IKK-Free subject: Art & Health: The Aesthetics of Pleasure & Pain

This course approaches the aesthetic nexus of pleasure and pain from diverse interdisciplinary theoretical fields including affect theory, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and the medical humanities, while drawing on analytical approaches in art history and visual culture, musicology, theatre and performance studies, and comparative literature in connection with the expertise of the course instructors. 

A central objective of this course is to confront normative constructions of “pleasure” and “pain” by foregrounding marginalized creative perspectives that reflect on the pleasure/pain continuum as a diverse physiological, emotional, cultural, and political experience in accordance with the inherent diversity of human embodiment and identity. We will thus examine the aesthetics of pleasure and pain in connection with diverse forms of artistic representation vis-à-vis the following topics:

• The pathologization of pleasure and pain
• Phenomenologies of disability, illness, trauma
• The performative dynamics of hospital spaces
• Aging, pain, and the “pleasure deficit”
• Racialized emotions and diasporic pain
• Mental health and popular music
• The erotics of Autism
• Queer and trans politics of desire
• Fetish and non-genital sexuality
• The cultural phenomenon of glory holes and dick pics