Throughout my reading of Middlesex, I became increasingly interested in the tone of Cal’s narration during the passages he’s writing in present-tense (in Germany, with Julie, thinking about the past). It is during these passages that he touches on some of the more political aspects of his story – the parts that I’m most interested […]
To me, Sula is the only work so far that I believe can be analyzed beside all the other works we’ve read and examined thus far, plus the readings. The Scarlet Letter, like another student previously mentioned, is ripe with parallels to Sula in regards to the perception of adultery, sensuality, sexuality, child-rearing, and more. […]
Even after thinking about it for the past few days, I’m struggling to come with up connections between Lolita and the readings in Major Problems, and want to have this up tonight so I’m going to try and provide analysis in a different way and edit the post later if I can form a cohesive […]
Out of all the things we’ve read thus far, I think Lolita has been the best at illustrating Foucault’s ideas surrounding the discourse of sexuality. I imagine The History of Sexuality would have been much easier for me to understand at the time of reading if, every few paragraphs, there had been an excerpt from […]
I continue to find myself surprised and shocked by what I read in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality – and not so much by the theses of the essayists, but by the content of the primary documents published. So full of judgment, so full of values imposed cross-institutionally…and yet, I shouldn’t be […]
To me, the document in chapter 4 entitled “Boston Female Moral Reformers Condemn ‘Licentious Men’” reads as an introduction to an early 19th century version of “He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut” by Jessica Valenti. Valenti’s book outlines double standards that we live by as men and women, specifically ones that appear in social and […]
For me, parts 4 and 5 of The History of Sexuality were harder to dissect than the first 3. It felt as though, at times, the discussion of power – the use of the word over and over again, the statements like ‘power is this and power is not that, power does this but power […]
(Not sure exactly how to begin the discussion but I’ll jump right in.) No amount of briefly excerpted Foucault could have prepared me for jumping right into this major work after a month long break from academic-style writing. On Thursday Professor Quinby told us to be prepared and okay with not understanding everything that we […]
