For millennia humans have transformed the physical surfaces and spatial contours of their bodies by concealing, revealing, embellishing, expanding, and constricting. In doing so they have fashioned personal space and defined communal identities. Through slide lectures, readings, discussions, library research, and written assignments, students closely weigh the human impulse to modify the body. Each week students consider the diverse ideologies used to construct the social body from a cross-cultural perspective: notions of humanness, nakedness, protection, power, spiritual transformation, gender identities, ethnicity, beauty ideals, and modernity. The course reviews such material as the Islamic veil, African masking, Polynesian tattooing, Classical drapery, European cross-dressing, Chinese foot binding, and Japanese armor. Students also will examine how these models have influenced other disciplines, including sculpture, photography, and painting through the work of such artists as Christo, Nan Goldin, and Louise Brooks.

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