The Culture Wars

The Culture Wars: The Political Body in
Performance

The Culture Wars: The Political Body in
Performance is a graduate level course that
focuses on the relationship between national US
politics, arts funding, censorship,
gender/sexuality, religion, and race. It covers
the history leading up to the "NEA Four," spending
a bulk of time with the 1980s and 1990s, then will
move into the Trump/COVID era. Questions asked in
this course include, how does the "New Jim Crow"
(its anti-Black violence, including the
disproportionate murder and incarceration of Black
men) intersect with Reagan's disregard for the
AIDS Crisis and defunding of the arts? How is the
gay male body rendered a "contagion" during the
AIDS pandemic? What is the relationship between
politics and degrees of sexual concealment and
explicitness? How do national discourses
interpellate American subjects of the State? What
is the role of the body in performance during the
Culture Wars? Relatedly, how do Presidents such as
Reagan and Trump harness charisma to "perform"
their own kind of political "theater" during the
Culture Wars, and how do citizens perform gender,
race, and class in everyday life?

Open to the institute, this course is open to
graduate students across campus, and fulfills
critical studies credit. The Culture Wars engages
a methodology that includes scholarly research,
reading, and writing, as well as performance and
art experiments and collective projects and
actions. While offered through the School of
Dance, this course is decidedly interdisciplinary
and rigorous, and commits to an inclusive and
anti-racist environment. The Culture Wars will be
attuned to all areas of visual and performing
arts, and graduate students from every métier are
welcome.