HAA 183w

Women in South Asian Art
Jinah Kim
Monday, 1-3pm
This course aims to provide a historical perspective for understanding the contemporary politics of body and gender representation by exploring historical examples of female patronage of art and by attending to the development of goddess cults through archaeological and art historical evidence. By scrutinizing visual representations of female body in South Asia and by locating them in the context of aesthetic theories and erotic science, we will also problematize exoticizing views of “erotica Indica”, including the prevalent use of erotic imagery from medieval temples for illustrating the Kamasutra in the West. The readings for this course are interdisciplinary, and we will cover a broad range of materials from medieval sculptures, to miniature paintings, and to an interpretive animated cartoon of the Hindu epic, Rāmāyana