Spring Fever PANIC! Reading: Sexuality and Resistance as Living Literature Our philosophical and historical discussion of sexuality in American culture has been informed by renowned and canonized fiction, as well as scientific contexts and personal documents. This PANIC! reading project is a blend of theories, realities, fictions, and confessions in a theatrical, real-time, literary […]
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 […]
The range of psychoses related in Lolita is relentless. The entire text could be a document in Peiss’s textbook, and wading through these murky waters becomes an exercise in suspicion. Humbert’s mixture of paranoia and recklessness makes me root for his success in keeping his and Lo’s anonymiy despite my increasing disgust and fury with […]
Various thoughts on love and sex in the 19th century Perhaps aptly, “Alice Mitchell as a ‘Case of Sexual Perversion’” was published by a Comstock: T. Griswold Comstock. His analysis was appalling, in my opinion. There was indeed something wrong with Alice Mitchell – some sort of mental disorder that caused her to murder another […]
Consent and Cautionary Tales Puritan colonial discourse liberally interchanges sodomy, unclean lusty acts, and rape. The concept of consent in sexual interaction appears vague and not at all relevant except in the final clause of Massachusetts Colony’s Laws on Sexual Offenses, where the offender may possibly punished with death for “ravishing” a woman by force. […]
Here is the compiled slideshow for my amateur photoshoot at the the Museum of Sex. Super-Cultural Constructs The first class discussion on Foucault left me reeling, because I could not understand how I had missed or completely misinterpreted some of his most emphasized points. Granted, reading on a crowded train doesn’t help, but neither does […]
The third of Foucault “strategic unities” (103) for knowledge and power over and about sex is “a socialization of procreative behavior” (104) for partners in relationships. The socialization is, in essence, all the factors “brought to bear on the fertility of couples” (104-105). This is a discussion worth bringing into the present, and into present […]
The two essays we read for this week from Kathy Peiss’s book, by Weeks and Norton respectively, seem to be a case of social constructivism versus essentialism. Weeks argues that sexuality – not the less ambiguous word “sex” – is not something natural, a biological function to be examined by scientists (as Foucault’s scientia sexualis, […]
Michel Foucault, in the discourse relayed in his work The History of Sexuality, or L’Histoire de la Sexualité, the history of power, pleasure, and knowledge as told by referencing specific acts and records generated by a population. To explore, whatever may develop, mostly in the absence; yet only to discover renewed […]
Sexual Discourse Michel Foucault is a tricky guy. He completely fools the reader while he is summarizing the history of sexual repression, beginning with the Victorian Era. He steadily goes through the thought process of what we all believe to be the true political history of our sexual attitudes. He calls these ideas the repressive […]
