With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.