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 […]
Families with Fluid Boundaries The way power was used in Ronald Bayer’s essay, AIDS and the Bathhouse Controversy was quite interesting. Essentially, the question was whether the San Francisco government could control the private lives of gay individuals in the name of public health. As stated in the essay, the criminalization of homosexuality by the […]
Sula’s Sex Powers I thought that the pedagogization of sex that was present throughout the novel was an interesting contrast to the Stevenson essay in which women equated sex with principle. As a previous poster stated, Sula learned her sexual behaviors from her mother, Hannah. Hannah was described as sleeping with men easily and often. […]
The way Sula’s community reacts to both her life and death is an interesting realization of Foucault’s idea that where there is power there is resistance. Sula lives her life with a sense of power. She sleeps with whomever she wants, refuses to marry, allows her mother to be placed in a home, and lives […]
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 […]
Dr. Humbert and Destitute Dolly Kaitlyn mentioned how Part 2 attacks psychology, and I completely agree. I felt this most strongly in chapter 1, when H.H. uses Dolores’ natural resistance to being kidnapped and raped against her: “I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; […]
Sex, Death, and Lexiconsiousness This week, while reading Nabokov’s masterpiece, I was also traveling around the National Cherry Blossom Festival in DC. My absorption of the narrative was contextualized by the event — Japanese trees in bloom, tourists and GW students of all ages, races, intellects, couplings, and persuasions.
Dolores, or Lolita Something very intriguing to me in Nabokov’s Lolita is the fact that Humbert Humbert needed to create a separate identity for Dolores (much like, as Jaslee pointed out, he needs to create “nymphets” to rationalize his lust for young girls.) To him, Dolores is hardly ever Dolores – she is sometimes Lo, […]
Victorian Discourse in Volumes In the Puritan world, the hand of God or the temptation of the devil were to be found anywhere and everywhere. For the Victorians, the readings for this week seem to point less to an obsession with sin than to an obsession with words and language.
