Undergraduate Course: Sexuality and Space: Art, Film and The City, 1900 to the Present Day (HIAR10080)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Available to all students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | History of Art |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | Defined in a broad terms, sexuality has been the defining discourse of western cultures since the Enlightenment, with debates around hygiene, policing, and personal freedom all defined out of a desire to understand, control and sometimes restrict sexual conduct. The discourse of sexuality has also been a discourse about spaces, both public and private, where sexuality is enacted. Freud's earliest writings about sex are as much reflections about a city - Vienna - and its social mores as they are about behaviour or pathology. The polemical work of modernist architects such as Le Corbusier hinted at a newly liberated world, in which free-flowing interior spaces somehow framed a liberated attitude to sex, informed by a knowledge of psychoanalysis. The explosion of single-family suburban housing all over the developed world in the 1950s represents in the clearest material terms the ideal of the nuclear family, and the internalisation of sexuality. And more recently, in Britain, there has been an emerging consciousness in government of a need to supply millions of extra housing units in the near future, a direct representation of long-term changes in family life and patterns of attachment. Our cities are shaped by our changing attitudes to sexuality.
Key questions in this course include: how have changing attitudes to sexuality informed the design of buildings? How has the design of public space responded to fears about sexual license, prostitution in particular? How have buildings and spaces been adapted, post-realisation, to accommodate changing sexualities? How did architecture respond to the so-called sexual revolution? How have these things been represented in art and film? The course is organised around a series of clear case studies, from buildings, to films, to artworks.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| Displayed in Visiting Students Prospectus? | Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
1. Content: a thorough knowledge of the key ideas in the history of sexuality from 1900 to the present (Freud, Reich, Marcuse, Laing, Foucault, Weeks etc.); a thorough knowledge of how these ideas inform our understanding of key architectural spaces (imperial Vienna, Le Corbusier's modernist villas, Early Brazilian modernism, the Case Study houses, Constant Niewenhuys, SI projects for Paris, Archigram's, Superstudio, etc.); a thorough understanding of how ideas of sexuality are represented in art and film of the same period (Hitchcock, Godard etc)
2. Resources: most textual and cinematic sources are already be available in the University library
3. Teaching methods: the approach will be based around student-led seminar papers, followed by group discussion. Detailed reading/research tasks will be given out each week. Students will develop presentation and speaking abilities to a high level. Research tasks will include some fieldwork (visits to buildings): in these tasks students will gain experience of documenting architectural spaces.
4. Assessment: as usual, formal assessment will be a mixture of an exam and a 2000-word essay. Informal feedback on progress will be provided as a result of seminar presentations.
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Assessment Information
| 1 x 2 hour examination (50%) and 1 x extended essay (50%) |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
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| Syllabus |
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| Transferable skills |
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| Reading list |
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| Study Abroad |
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| Study Pattern |
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| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Richard Williams
Tel: (0131 6)51 6792
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Sue Cavanagh
Tel: (0131 6)51 1460
Email: |
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