The Perfectible Body in Religions, Medicines, and Politics
A comparative seminar exploring cultural institutions of politics, medicine, and religion to examine ideas of the perfect body, bodily privilege, and perfectibility across cultures, genders, ages, and species.
Summary
Recent recorded grades — Spring 2025: 4.00 GPA, 100.0% A/AB (n=18 letter grades).
What you’ll be able to do
Summarize discourses in the cultural institutions of politics, medicine, and religion that provide the public with ideas about what constitutes a perfect body.
Clarify why different bodies (and different parts of the body) are privileged over others in social institutions in the past and in the present.
Explore why the notion of "bodily perfectibility" differs cross-culturally, as well as across social divisions of age, gender, sex, and socioeconomics.
Investigate the relationship between ideals of bodily perfectibility and the practical attainability of those ideals.
Analyze expressions of embodiment and perfectibility in diverse historical and cultural contexts to determine the relevance of the seminar's core principles to UW–Madison research projects.
Source: UW Guide 1· UW Guide 2
Grade history
↗All recorded terms · compare terms & instructors
Prerequisites
Course mapJunior standing
- Junior standing
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Prerequisite text tree
- Junior standing
Professors
Spring 2027No instructors recorded for this selection.
Historical instructors & teaching patterns
Recorded history may be incomplete and does not establish a future schedule.
Calendar & sections
Spring 2027Schedule loads here as you scroll.
| Section | Mode | Enrolled / capacity | Waitlist |
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Times are Central. Select a meeting for details; export includes recorded dates for the selected sections.
Meeting source records
No records available.
Student experience
the class
Recent recorded grades — Spring 2025: 4.00 GPA, 100.0% A/AB (n=18 letter grades).
difficulty & workload
No workload feedback recorded.
Topics
- Cultural institutions of politics, medicine, and religion
- Ideas about what constitutes a perfect body
- Privileging of different body parts
- Bodily perfectibility across gender, age, and species
- Attainability of the perfect body
- Beneficiaries of bodily perfection rhetoric
Skills
- Summarizing discourses on body ideals in politics, medicine, and religion
- Clarifying the privileging of specific bodies or body parts in social institutions
- Exploring cross-cultural and social differences in bodily perfectibility
- Investigating the attainability of bodily perfection ideals
- Analyzing embodiment and perfectibility in historical and cultural contexts
Grades
Latest available · Spring 2025— not enough history to project Spring 2027.
Grade distribution · % of letter grades
More grade details Grade mix, volume & source data
Not enough comparable courses for Spring 2027 in UW–Madison.
Sources & history
Catalog & offerings
Descriptions, prerequisites, and recorded course offerings.
Catalog observation history
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Raw records
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Student reviews
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Grade history
Recorded grade distributions by term, section, and instructor.
Explore recorded gradesRecorded 2026-10-14
Model outputs & technical records
LLM outputs across runs
Full model traces
Recorded model configuration, reasoning, and tool conversations.
Model & dataset provenance
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