This SPA406 Life-writing, Gender, and Representation Seminar is designated to engage students in the politics of life-writing, theoretical frameworks, and inquisitive and contesting reading/viewing of a relevant body of contemporary fictional and non-fictional narratives including embodied tapestries, a visual disability diary, a fictional mystery biography, a graphic biopic, and autofictional testimonial, journalistic chronicles, an animated biopic, newsreels, life-writing documentaries, poetic self-portrait, auto/biographical song-writing, iconic films, and political interviews, among other fictional and non-fictional life-writing discourses.
Unsettling modes of life-writing including auto/biographical, autofiction, and performative discourses will interrogate us as readers/spectators, challenging us to construct a manifesto of an unstable model of life-writing, gender, and representation centered on the concept of assemblage. Studentes will engage in life-writing practices in relation to subjects, positionalities, subjectivities, materiality, agency, memory, embodiment, and experience.
We will explore multiple spectatorial positions, deconstructice approaches, epistemological shifts, conflicting interpretations, manufactured images, iconic elusive micronarratives, fragmented versions, and fluid discourses.
- Teacher: Magdalena Maiz-Pena