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This is a course about art, sex, and violence. It begins with art produced in response to, or as part of, social and political events from the 1960s to the present in which sexuality and violence--including symbolic and imaginary violence-converge: the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the American war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement, the gay liberation movement, the abortion rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the AIDS crisis, 'culture wars' of the 1980s and 1990s, the first Gulf War, terrorism and the 'war on terror', and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of equal significance for this special subject are bodies of work that reflect on sex and violence more obliquely, by troubling the conventional split between the psychic and the social in political discourse, for example. The course draws on the literatures of psychoanalysis, feminism, and gender studies, as well as on critical and historical texts. It is structured around case studies and aims to respond to current exhibitions and events.

Among the artists whose work we may consider are: Eleanor Antin, Louise Bourgeois, Valie Export, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Lee Lozano, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. Among the critics and theorists whose work we may discuss are: Ariella Azoulay, Leo Bersani, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, Chantal Mouffe, Jacqueline Rose, and Slavoj Žižek. Among the classic psychoanalytic texts we may study are works by: Franco Fornari, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, Hanna Segal, and D.W. Winnicott. Among the classic political texts we may read are works by: Hannah Arendt, Angela Davis, and Virginia Woolf.