This UWinnipeg Women’s and Gender Studies self-directed, interdisciplinary, project-based course provides students with the opportunity, in close consultation with a professor, to pursue in depth a selected area of queer and feminist theory, thought, and action. Topics will vary and syllabi are developed in regards to the students’ and professor’s interests and capacities. Available for third and fourth year level courses. See below for past course examples, objectives, and work produced.
WGS 3900 – Performing Queer and Feminist Ecologies
This course explored the mechanics and politics of performance as informed by queer and feminist ecological thought. Students engaged with concepts of embodiment, movement, critical eco-spatiality, and narration as related to the art of performance. We explored how to apply these concepts to our own lives, the spaces we navigate, the politics of study, and our practices of artistic creation. This process was developed through deep engagements with Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s notion of scoring, encompassing four interconnected cycles of resource gathering, scoring, valuactive reflection, and performance. In turning to the artist collective, SWARM, students unpacked what it means to consider ecological degradation, sympoetic kinship, and decolonial epistemologies in relation to performance based research-creation methodologies. In acknowledgement that this course ran alongside SWARM, collaboration was encouraged and selected assignments remained in the collective’s arc/hive. As a central facet of our learning lied in artistic production and ways of knowing, creative and imaginative responses were required.
Course Materials
Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin, editors. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment, and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, 2015. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Davis-Turpin_2015_Art-in-the-Anthropocene.pdf
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Levin, Laura and Marlis Schweitzer, editors. Performance Studies in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
Hot Plastic Suits – Dallas Cant
“Hot Plastic Suits is an exploratory performance that considers the inter-implications of materiality, discarded excess, commerciality, and paid erotics. A plastic embroidered suit comprised of 60 layers of pressed discarded bags occupies the frame as a commercialized eco-friendly ‘product’. The suit serves as a catalyst to both parody the language and individualized rhetoric of green capitalism and take seriously the mundane emotionality of living with materially informed environments. By working directly with uncared for ‘leftovers’ of capitalist consumption, Hot Plastic Suits questions how human-centered and colonial systems of imagined limitlessness and replicability have encouraged fleeting affections with human and beyond human things. Gestures of care, joy, boredom, and emptiness emerge through Cant’s movement with the plastic suit. These gestures emphasize the artist’s own internalization of colonial relationships to materials, food, clothing, and environment – literalized through the use of subtitled text. The incorporation of erotic movement, mouth work, and plasticized payment complicates overtly simplistic critiques of commerciality, calling for a queer environmental politics that does not demonize money-defined relationships entirely, but rather, works to unravel the greed and destruction of colonialism without forgetting the legitimacy of sex work.”
WGS 4900 – Assembling the Post-Human: Feminist Imaginings Beyond the Anthropocene
The purpose of this course was for the student to build upon their knowledge of and critically engage with literature in the field of Anthropocene Feminisms. Further, this course allowed for the student to explore related fields of interest, such as Assemblage theory and post-humanism. Artistic/creative works by the student made up a considerable amount of the course in order to further the student’s artistic practice. Specifically, feminist collage and animation artists were studied and served as a reference in the student’s own artistic pursuits. Finally, in acknowledgement that this course was run alongside artist-researcher collective SWARM, collaboration was encouraged and selected assignments remained in the collective’s arc/hive. The course consisted of readings, reading responses, maintaining an artist’s journal, collaborative projects, small research assignments, and cumulated with a research paper and final artistic project.
Course Materials
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Beckman, Karen. 2014. Animating Film Theory. Durham: Duke University Press.
Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity and Disability. Durham: Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human World. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
1 $I¢K ₤₦D – Jen Sebring
“Through collage and stop-motion animation 1 $I¢K ₤₦D explores what it means to be chronically ill at the “end of the world”. Juxtaposing imagery and text from drug advertisements; personal prescription refill histories; medical manuals; and prescribed drug side-effect warnings, against images and text taken from a National Geographic article on Superfund sites, this film weaves a cautionary tale about the for-profit medical industry, its relationship to capitalism, and how both are devastating the Earth and its inhabitants. Drawing from the emerging field of “composting feminisms” and seeking meaning beyond the despair of “end-of-the-world” discourse, this piece recognizes each individual as, first, an assemblage of matter – permeable, vulnerable, and ever-changing, and second, as part of a larger body: our planet and its many multi-species relations. It looks to these bodies, and their ongoing processes of decomposition as a way of understanding our own materiality as part of this process – necessarily decaying to allow for the cultivation of new growth. 1 $I¢K ₤₦D disavows panic or apathy in the face of climate crisis, and instead, asks us to consider how we are implicated in the process of “compost” and how we might rely on inter-dependence as a way of coping with these vulnerable bodies in uncertain times.”