Posts Tagged: power relations

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 […]

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 […]

Power and Coercion in Lolita Part 2 of Lolita was heavy on the power relations, particularly between HH and Lo.  Throughout their cross-country travels and stay at Beardsley, HH is impossibly controlling.  To keep her as subdued as he can, Humbert uses the adult-child power dynamic to threaten Lo and holds money and other material […]

Power in The Scarlett Letter Godbeer’s essay, “Sodomy in Colonial New England” posed an interesting history about the definition of sodomy and the power relations within that definition.  Previous coursework of mine (more specifically, American Legal Systems) established that sodomy was non-reproductive sex.  This definition was present in the Godbeer essay as part of the […]