ENGLISH 790 / MJ Postmortem: New Critical Reflections

3 unit(s)

(cross-listed as CULTR ST 790)

This course considers Michael Jackson’s complex performances of race, gender/sexuality, embodiment and kinship as a vehicle through which to consider the idea of posthumanist assemblage. The over-arching thematic in Jackson’s art and life was his “transgression” of normative boundaries–of race, gender, generation, body morphology, divisions among species, artistic genres and technologies. Jackson moved so fluidly among performance traditions and subjectivities that he might productively be (re)thought through the lens of critical posthumanism and its connections to feminist, queer and critical race studies.