This class will focus on eighteenth-century writing about bodies that disrupt understandings of what a “natural” or “normal” body is amidst a historical moment when modern forms of gender, sexuality, race, and disability were in the process of being established. We will consider how literature helped to shape these normative models but will focus in particular on how authors imagined transgressive and radical new ways of inhabiting the world. Along the way we will encounter queer love poems, fluid and nonbinary gender identities, early articulations of antiracism and disability rights, weird science, talking animals, and a woman giving birth to rabbits.
Class format: online, asynchronous & synchronous (one Zoom meeting per week)
Readings: all available online; may include work by Jonathan Swift, William Hay, Charlotte Charke, Mary Wortley Montagu, Olaudah Equiano, and Robert Hooke
Assignments: students will be evaluated on participation and a series of short writing assignments culminating in a final essay