Category: Kaitlyn O’Hagan

Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition For my creative project, I chose to create a board game – Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition. Initially, my intent was to create a game that would test the knowledge our class gained over the course of the semester in a fun, nontraditional way. However, I […]

“Can transvestites be cured?” asked Time in an article reporting on Christine Jorgensen (Peiss, 375). If the article were about Cal, perhaps the question asked would be: Can hermaphrodites be cured? Within these questions lies the assumption that these things – these genders – need to be cured. “In some cases of transvestitism, as in […]

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4420-advice-about-relationships/ Not quite directly related to anything we’re discussing at the moment, but I’m an avid reader of Cracked.com articles and this one seemed relevant, at least in a general way, to our class. Enjoy! (PS – My favorite line: “Those ad f!!!ers think The Feminine Mystique is a how-to manual.”)

“I think love breaks all taboos. Don’t you?” (67)

Response to Angels in America “Roy: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that” (Millennium Approaches, Act 1, […]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18494_15-unintentionally-perverted-toys-children.html

The opening description of Medallion provides a description of power relations in clear contrast with what we had been discussing during our last class; the physical representation is reversed, since the black residents of Medallion (on a hill) look down on the white residents of the valley below them. When this reverse physical representation is […]

Unreliability, Psychology, Liberty Well we certainly get our fill of the unreliable narrator in Part 2 of Lolita. First, H.H. can’t remember his and Lolita’s travel itinerary (which contrast suspiciously with his seemingly photographic memory earlier). On their second cross-country trip there is the question of weather or not someone is following H.H. and Lolita, […]

Lolita as a Foucauldian Case Study Reading the introduction to Lolita invoked a strong sense of déjà vu, which I realized came from the uncanny similarities between it and “The Custom House”.  Both introductions serve to set up the stories as “true” (or in terms of The Scarlet Letter, based on a true story). More […]

Vampires, Sexuality, and SciFi (I wrote this on Saturday night, but couldn’t post it due to a lack of internet access) I’m writing this blog post from Rye, New York, home to Lunacon – a science fiction/fantasy convention that I’ve attended almost every year since I was an infant. With Professor Benavides’ talk on Vampires […]