Inside/Outside/From/On/Beyond the Body: A Writing Course for Grrls with Guts

Taught by Renee Angle and Kimi Eisele

This course will review basic literary concepts and help cultivate literary-based self-expression that focuses on the body as a primary site of knowledge, creativity, and subversion. Its aim is to help girls develop their own personal agenda for social change and use creative, language-driven actions as a way to publicly voice their presence, ideas, and opinions.
Through guided activities and readings, we will explore the ways girls’/women’s bodies have been seen and interpreted by others, how we view and inhabit our own bodies, and how we can present the truth of who we are both to ourselves and beyond our own skin. By playing with dolls, scientific drawings/models, movement, maps, drums, henna and temporary tattoos, and altered books we will create new ways of discussing, representing, being in, and projecting our bodies to both ourselves and others.
The class is divided into three sections. 1) The Body Map, 2) The Bridge, and 3) The Body Politic.

BLOGGING:
In addition to in-class exercises and reading, you will be asked to keep a blog. Blogs will allow you to explore your thoughts on the assigned readings, class activities, or ideas for their final project. It is intended to be a journal of sorts, a record of your time exploring these issues in this community. More than that, we can consider the Internet and blogs to be another type of “body” that your words, pictures, graphics, and ideas help to shape. Thinking about what you put in a private journal versus what you put on a published and public website changes the nature of both your own and your peers’ writing. The ease in which you can revise and alter your words and thoughts online also affects this body of information. Our hope is that blogging will help us all materialize, examine, and negotiate complex relationships between the public and the private, the inner and the outer body.

The logistics:
Set up a blog on blogspot.com.
If you already have a blog, set up a separate one for this class and link to your other blog.
Write 350 words per week. Writing suggestions based on in-class discussion, upcoming classes, and reading material will be offered. You are also invited to write about encounters/ideas/objects from outside of class that relate to the course.
Provide links on your blog to everyone in class.
Visit someone else’s blog once a week, read their entry and post a comment.
You should post a comment on a new blog every week.
Comments should remain constructive and respectful.

NOTE: This syllabus is a suggested road map. Our route subject to change based on where you all decide you want to go!

PART ONE: The Body Map
Girls will locate themselves, map their own bodies, and explore the idea of the “gaze” to deepen their understanding of literary activism.

Week 1: Overview
Introductions, class norms, project goals, blogging.
Visual discussion on “the body” as site of personal, literary, and political activism. How do we define the body? Where does my body belong (subculture discussion)? What are the larger “bodies” we belong to? How do I make a difference with my “body”?
Examples of literary activism and art/writing using the body.
Assignment:
1) Read Bridget Booher’s “Body Map of My Life.” Plot 5 markings/places on your own body and write about them (you may mimic Booher’s style or do your own).
2) Read excerpts from Moraga & Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back
3) Set-up blog and post entry.


Week 2: Personal Geographies
Discuss readings
View body map examples from Katherine Harmon’s You Are Here (book of maps)
Activity: Body maps & writing
Assignment:
1) Excerpts from Dana Levin’s In the Surgical Theatre
2) “The Lesson” from Toni Cade Bombara’s Gorilla, My Love,
3) Joan Didion Essay on Barbie Dolls
4) Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll.”
5) Blog post

Class 3: Scrutiny and the Gaze
Visit to UA med school to see cadavers (ooooh, cool!)
Alternative: View scientific diagrams/models of the body and examples of dolls in class
Discuss: medical theatre, the “gaze,” the “seen” vs. the “unseen” body, dolls, What do dolls, past and present, tell us about how we are viewed?
Writing exercise: Anatomy, dolls, comparing & contrasting
Assignment:
1) Emily Dickinson
2) Anne Waldman
3) Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”
4) “Poet at the Dance: In Conversation with Rita Dove” on Poets.org
5) Blog post

PART TWO: THE BRIDGE
Students will link the inner and outer body and voice through activities that challenge them to move beyond the personal “I” and into a public space.

Week 4: Writing from the Body
Activity: Words & movement exercises with Kimi (modern dance as embodied expression); exercises are designed to reveal connections between writing brain and body brain…accessing memory and writing material through movement and generating movement from words
Assignment:
1) Blog post


Week 5: How Loud Can We Be?
Activity: Taiko drumming class with visiting artists Karen or Rome of Odaiko Sonora
Dropping into the body: weight; Where do our voices come from? How loud can we be?
Assignment:
1) Hanna Weiner
2) Article from “Bomb” on blood footprints

Week 6: Writing on the Body
Review discussions from previous classes about the gaze and scrutiny. Now, what do we want to project?
Writing exercise.
Activity: Visit from henna artist; write on the body with Henna and/or temporary tattoos
Assignment:
1) Jenny Boully’s The Body
2) Wikipedia entry on Romance Novel
3) Excerpts from The Body Project
4) Blog post


PART THREE: The Body Politic
Students will consider the term “alteration”/the prefix “re” (as in revision, re-map, return, rewrite) to consider how they might alter their own inner/outer bodies, their body of knowledge and the larger body politic in positive ways. Through their final projects, they will demonstrate a subversion of or a revision of their own ideas and/or of societal constructs of the “body” and the “feminine.”

Week 7: Altering the Body
Discussion: the literary cannon as “a body of knowledge.” Who do we read and why?
Activity: Creating altered texts
Choice of erasure of dime store romance novels and/or creating the text for which Boully’s footnotes are intended.
Visiting artist: Lisa Bowden, Alice? Another book artist?

Assignment:
1) Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South and Geography III
2) Reggio Tutta: A Guide to the City by the Childen (maps by children in Italian city of Reggio Emilia
3) Blog post

Week 8: The Body Politic
Activity: Return to body maps
Discuss: What is the “Body Politic”? How do we use the idea of “body” (our own or others) to make statements about ourselves and the world? Who is our audience?


Weeks 9-12: Beyond the Body
Final Project Preparation

Girls will choose project concepts to develop and complete by end of course.

Project ideas:
1) Performance
a. Site specific movement
b. Vocalization
c. Music
d. Interventionist actions

2) Broadcast
a. Radio PSAs
b. Voices

3) Alteration
a. Clothes
b. Books
c. Advertisements/ “Sub”-vertisements
d. The body


Final ACT: TBA