Posts Tagged: hysterization

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 […]

Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is heavy on sexuality, disease, politics, professional discrimination, religion, race, and gender.  The two themes that stick out most to me are sexuality and gender.  The portrayal of the Jewish identity as ethnicity versus religion is very realistic for the modern day, and it is not a treatment […]

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 […]

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 […]

Regarding the deployment of sexuality, Foucault discusses four strategies that, beginning in the 18th century, were used to distinguish the working relationship of knowledge and power of sex.  The very first, the “hysterization of women’s bodies”, focuses on the woman and how mentally and physically she became a symbol of the scientia sexualis of the […]