The purpose of this portrait series was to investigate the way power relations fluctuate when assuming roles—the Photographer, the Subject, the Viewer—that are defined and attached to the medium of photography and how that affects the results. I’ve chosen two poses: in the first the Subject looks at the camera and, indirectly, at the Viewer; […]
Though we had touched on the idea of identity in class before, I am happy that Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex throws us right into it. The debate of inter-sexuality as an “identity or disorder”, as posed by the Shenker-Osorio article, is a question still relevant today, maybe even more-so. A person’s sexual identity defines them fully in […]
Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction. The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in […]
Though absolutely devastating and often hard to swallow, the position of enslaved African American women described by Brenda E. Stevenson in “Slave Marriage and Family Relations” evoked the kinds of power that we had read about earlier (Nancy Cott). Women had little say in determining the path of romance in their lives and would often […]
While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita my first instinct was to identify Foucault’s four strategic unities. A simple task, as it turned out, for this beautifully written text couldn’t have set up the four unities more clearly: the hysterical woman (Charlotte), the masturbating child (Dolly), the Malthusian couple (Humbert & Charlotte), and the perverse adult (Humbert […]
Hearing Professor Benavides’s lecture made me remember why I love the horror genre and it’s ability to jam-pack current socio-political and economic issues under masks of entertainment. As kids, my best friend and I would wait for $.99 Wednesdays to run to the corner video store and get a new horror film. From Halloween to […]
In the 1892 case of Alice Mitchell in Chapter 6 of Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the author talks about “urnings”, which are individuals who are only stimulated people of the same sex, i.e. “unnatural sexual practices” (Peiss, 199). There is a parallel between sexual desire of two females and theses “unnatural […]
Last night Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director. As you may know, the film industry is essentially a Boys Club and if you didn’t know, well, I’m afraid it is. Though this is certainly a great achievement, a ‘milestone’, not only for women, but the industry […]
In Nancy F. Cott’s “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850” she talks about how between 1777 and 1794, a study of nine New England magazines indicates that in nonfiction and fiction stories, regarding illicit sex, men were punished, while women were given sympathy. This is interesting for two reasons: the first being that, […]
As the hour of last week’s This American Life was coming to close, I realized how Foucauldian this story was. “81 Words” is about how the American Psychiatric Association came to the decision to remove homosexuality as a disease from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. This tale not only deals with power […]
