Humboldt University Berlin

This course will investigate the ways in which the policing of gender and sexuality intersected with the policing of (ethno) national boundaries in Central-Eastern Europe, with a focus on the state-socialist period (1945-1990) but including the interwar period and the post socialist period as contextual bookends. At the same time, it will explore the ways in which the socialist ideologies of gender equality and internationalism were actually (and selectively) implemented in these countries, the effect this had on women and men from both ethnic majority and minority populations in these countries. Finally, it takes a transnational approach, looking at the role of gender and sexuality in positioning Central Eastern Europe within the (white) West, and in the West’s perception and ‘othering’ of the region.

At the end of the 19th century, Britain was in many ways at the pinnacle of its power, having established global supremacy thanks to advances in industrialization and its vast colonial empire. However, cultural texts from the period project a number of profound anxieties about deviancy, degeneracy, decadence, and indistinct threats from adversaries both at home and abroad. Sociopolitical reasons for these uncertainties include the suffragette movement, socialist and anarchist action, campaigns for national self-determination in the form of e.g. Irish Republicanism or the Indian National Congress, as well as geopolitical tensions and technological changes. In this class, we examine narratives that represent, respond to, and process late Victorian cultural anxieties with a particular view to the violence that results from perceived threats to cultural hegemony. We situate a number of late Victorian novels in relation to emergent contemporary concepts such as (social) Darwinism, the unconscious, and (homo)sexuality, exploring how these concepts both shaped and were shaped by cultural anxiety. Additionally, we adopt frameworks from more recent theoretical approaches such as postcolonial and trans*queer studies to understand how cultural anxieties negotiate the boundaries between normative structures and their Other. Primary texts include Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 1891, Florence Marryat: The Blood of the Vampire, 1897, Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1899.
 

At the zenith of the civil rights movement in the USA and de-colonizing movements in Africa, the Carribean  and Asia, just prior to the advent of second wave feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and other social movements linking political liberation to embodied physical differences, something new was born. There arose a new vision of the body as precisely the obverse of how we now consider it—a single, universal human body shared by all, ungendered, unraced, unsexed. This new body-in-common, unmarked even by such core physical differences as biological sex, became legible as radically dissident under a new political ideology that has thus far largely escaped historical attention: Eros. As a potent challenge to a number of repressive orthodoxies, not least capitalism, Eros was also, perhaps not surprisingly, a central theme in a number of art works of the period, from Carolee Schneemann’s nude performances to Claes Oldenburg’s erotic public sculpture, Yayoi Kusama’s immersive environments, Helio Oticica’s Tropicales and Kenneth Anger’s films. This course examines the relationship among art, sex, gender and revolution from the vantage point of Eros’ brief historical moment, a vista now largely obscured by our contemporary fixation on a politics of social distinction and bodily difference. Reading the work of Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Norman O Brown and others, we will also study the art, film and performance of such key figures as Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Franz Erhardt Walters and Rebecca Horn.  As such, this period constitutes both the theoretical prehistory of the sexual revolution, as well as perhaps the defining episode in our ongoing transubstantiation of flesh into politics.

Trust is a central part of our daily lives as social and rational animals: we trust friends and partners, experts, and our devices; sometimes we even say that our devices trust other devices. But what is trust? What is it good for, and under what conditions? When is trust warranted? How is trusting agents different from trusting artifacts or institutions? Our readings and discussions will range widely, covering the significance of trust for our lives in general but especially for inquiry, drawing from psychological literature on trust, extending to applied questions, and comparing trust with similar things such as faith, reliance, and the ancient Greek concept of pistis (together with a discussion in Plato of misology as a disease of trust).

As a global conflict impacting society and culture, the Cold War poses a unique challenge for Musical historiography. While historians concentrate on the „superpowers“, the USA and the Soviet Union, the developing field of Cold War studies is emphasising the importance of smaller countries caught between west and east governments. With this expansion and new focus of our perspective, we are revising and pluralising our historiographical methods to make the dynamic national/historical borders of the Cold War more visible. The course uses the approach of political musical history to conceptualise the era. At the same time we also study broader Cold War history and new perspectives on national/international musical historiography.

The technological advances associated with Virtual Reality (VR), as well as its close cousins such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR), represent a fundamental shift in how humans experience the digital realm. Using devices such as VR-headsets, we can now access digital environments full of computer-generated simulations in a way that allows for a more intuitive kind of interactive experience than is typically afforded by more familiar uses of computers. In recent years, via devices such as the Oculus Rift, VR-technology has become increasingly accessible in the home and it is anticipated to become even more ubiquitous in the near future.

This class aims to examine a range of philosophical questions associatedwith VR. As we shall see, VR gives us new ways to both articulate classic philosophical problems and also to sharpen those problems. The relevant philosophical questions are wide-ranging, encompassing topics in epistemology (“Can you know you are not in a virtual world?”), metaphysics (“Are virtual worlds real?”), and value theory (“Can you live a good life in a virtual world?”). In examining these issues, we will focus on David Chalmers’ (2022) treatment of VR in his pioneering book Reality+, where Chalmers argues for a range of bold answers to these questions (and others): that we cannot know that we are not in a virtual world, that virtual worlds are just as real as non-virtual worlds, and that it is possible to lead a meaningful and valuable life in a virtual reality. By the end of the class, students will not only have been introduced to many of the most central philosophical problems, but will have further evaluated both the ways in which technology can shed light on old problems in philosophy and the ways in which philosophy can shed light on new problems about technology.

In this course, we will address two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in American art and 2) why do we so often find that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. Were queer artists driven by a utopian hope that in a more modern world, the egregious homophobia/transphobia of the past would finally be no more? And finally we will ask about the social and political usefulness of forms of queer political dissent if those forms still remain illegible as queer to a wider audience. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.

Barbie has been one of the iconic toys in US-American culture for decades. But what kinds of cultural messages do the dolls actually convey? How do they participate in debates about gender, 'race,' and class? About sexuality? Ability? Religion? Settler Colonialism? Ecological issues? How is this bound up with the process of their production and distribution – and the plastic waste they become when they are discarded? These are some of the questions we will discuss in class.

One of the key features of postmodernist thinking is the assertion of the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction: the realization that in everyday lives fictions, projections or hypothesis-building constantly interact with objects and facts of life (you can call this constructivist thinking); the realization that people’s identities are negotiations between social demands and imaginary projects; the realization that people’s senses of reality are heavily influenced by certain hegemonic (dominating) posits in terms of gender, labor (and consumption), media, race and ethnicity. Brian McHale has characterized the resultant tensions, as they are enacted in literature as “worlds in collision.” Cinema, as an art of montage and suturing, seems predetermined to enact these clashes. In this seminar we will explore the fuzzy boundaries discussing postmodern obsessions such as identities, surfaces, worlds, play, parody, high & low, consumer culture, media, gender performances and difference.