My choice to reimagine scenes from The Scarlet Letter, Lolita, and Middlesex in the context of 21st century technology, specifically the internet, came from three factors. One is the “Universe of Desire” exhibit at the Museum of Sex, which showcased the collision of sex and internet and blurring of publicity and anonymous “privacy.” The exhibit […]
After finishing The Scarlet Letter and this week’s selection of readings, like Colby, I noticed the similarity between Hester Prynne’s situation and the argument Nancy F. Cott makes in “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology 1790-1850.” Plus, from last class, the fact that The Scarlet Letter is a story about Puritans through a Victorian […]
At the end of our discussion last week, Professor Quinby prompted us to think about how Foucault’s notion of the deployment of sexuality shows up in our readings. I want to focus primarily on this weeks essays as I found them really interesting and a good springboard for discussion about the Scarlet Letter in class. […]
Sorry for the late post! After reading through some of your posts, I was glad to see that my recognition of the presence of the juridico-discursive model was shared…hopefully this means applying Foucault to our readings won’t be as impossible as I had imagined. I was particularly interested in the Custom-House section of this reading. […]
This week’s selections of readings played off each really well. From the historical excerpt of Massachusetts’s colony’s laws on sexual offenses, the overarching message is death is result of any sexual deviances away from heterosexual and martial sex in colonial America. However, that is not always the case (or even rarely the case) as evident […]
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality became much clearer after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s tale is the perfect lens through which to view juridico-discursiveness in action. I also enjoyed the added richness of the Foucauldian lens because I was reading The Scarlet Letter for the second time. This time around it was […]
