Comments for Sexuality and American Culture 2011 https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11 Professor Lee Quinby, Spring 2011 Mon, 09 May 2011 19:45:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Comment on Middlesex Part Two by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/09/middlesex-part-two/#comment-59 Mon, 09 May 2011 19:45:10 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=285#comment-59 Savannah,

This is a sensitive and thoughtful response to the novel. One of my favorites lines is this one you quoted: “it’s amazing what you can get used to.” Tomorrow let’s take up the question about what kind of novel it would be instead if Cal were to have become a strong and outspoken member of the Intersex community rather than the man who is depicted as a more ambivalent narrator, who is still grappling with intersex issues.

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Comment on Tiresias and the keys by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/06/tiresias-and-the-keys/#comment-58 Mon, 09 May 2011 16:24:27 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=278#comment-58 Ariana,
I love the parallels you’ve drawn between these 2 stories–and thanks for the link to Hurston’s fabulous folk tale! Definitely worth reading.

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Comment on Gender Identity construction by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/06/280/#comment-57 Mon, 09 May 2011 16:22:09 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=280#comment-57 Ariana,

This post will give us plenty to debate about in class. Everyone should go back to pages 296-7 to read over this section and think about your own seventh grade experience and how you regarded yourself and your classmates, not only in terms of bodily maturation but also in terms of the kinds of class difference and ethnic difference that contributed to what Cal/lie says was “Inferiority and superiority at once.”

Also, the issue of free will deserves our good thoughts in terms of both Jorgensen and Cal. Take it into account alongside the remark that Cal makes about what the hockey ball symbolizes: “Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we’re chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time” (294). How does free will mesh with bodily chains?

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Comment on Middlesex and Foucault by Savannah Gordon https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/03/253/#comment-55 Tue, 03 May 2011 15:59:51 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=253#comment-55 Eportfolio just told me I was a spam robot so I had to split this up into two. Whoops?

After reading the first few pages of the book I kept trying to find a reason as to why I hadn’t been basically forced to read this novel before. Studying gender, sexuality and the body politics surrounding it all for the past 2 years, I would have thought that a NYT Best Seller List-making novel centered around an intersex narrator would have been a centerpiece of conversation, and analysis and certainly utilized for its “teachable moments and passages”. However, the more I read, the more I understood that the story is so clearly about very universal, accessible themes and the fact that so many people may have read it, never having imagined that they would identify with an intersex narrator or the experiences/thoughts of an intersex person is in and of itself what makes the book “teachable” without really trying.

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Comment on Middlesex and Foucault by Savannah Gordon https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/03/253/#comment-54 Tue, 03 May 2011 15:59:33 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=253#comment-54 I love (and agree with) your interpretation of Cal’s ‘androgyny’ as going farther than simply gender presentation and appearance. Instead of occasionally dressing in an ambiguously gendered way, Cal’s androgyny manifests itself via his inner workings, certain 10 second long bouts of female influenced body movement he feels rise up and then subside again.

However, I had a different idea of what Cal meant when he wrote about a desire for unification…it read to me less like a desire to feel comfortable on one side or the other of the gender binary we find ourselves living by. Instead, I envisioned Cal in the same predicament that many intersex and transgender individuals find themselves in daily: hoping to find a unification of the parts of themselves that seem to come into conflict, such as outward (physical) post-pubescent development and inner feelings regarding gender. I think the ‘unification’ Cal desires is echoed in how un-binary (binary defying?) the rest of the novel is…like you said, it doesn’t adhere to fact/fiction, regular notions of a narrator’s knowledge before/after their own birth, myth/reality, and other similar dichotomies. Cal’s wish to come to a unification of self and have the result exist comfortably in the world outside of the gender binary is the message I got, supported by the ways in which other traditional binaries are treated throughout the narrative (that you and I both mentioned).

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Comment on SilkWorms by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/05/02/silkworms/#comment-50 Tue, 03 May 2011 00:16:27 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=247#comment-50 Richard,

Your discussion of the silk worm theme in the novel weaves a lovely tapestry depicting the novel’s intricate designs and shows why genealogy is so apt a term to describe both the study of intertwined lineages of people and a method of analysis that refuses the linearity of origin to end narratives. As you suggest, the narrator, 46 year old Cal, has chosen to emulate the silk worm in spinning a web of stories about families, wars, genocide, and genes and brings them all together to show not only the underside of the knotted threads of the tapestry but also its unraveling and re-stitching in acts of new self-creation.

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Comment on Ominous Rise of a Bachelor Generation by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/04/10/ominous-rise-of-a-bachelor-generation/#comment-43 Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:30:36 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=242#comment-43 HI Sami, thanks for this. Ferguson’s a little late in the game on bringing this crucial issue up, as he points out to some extent by citing Armatya Sen’s work from the 1990s. Feminists in particular have pointed to the ways in which reproductive technologies have produced a swell of male births in some countries, with feticide performed if the fetus isn’t male. One of my students last year, Nandini Shroff, wrote a wonderful thesis on just this topic in India. Female infanticide is also a practice in some countries that prefer male children. I find his lock up your daughters line to be part of the problem rather than a thoughtful response to the issue, which has historically been detrimental to women in ways that he highlights. The complex issue needs a less alarmist tone and reductive kind of description than he gives here.

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Comment on Sula & Sexuality by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/04/04/sula-sexuality/#comment-37 Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:10:28 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=222#comment-37 Hi (name please!),

One way to encapsulate the various comparisons that you’ve made here is through the theme of being a Pariah within the community. We see this with Hester initially (and then the shift), with HH in a different way, and explicitly with Sula. Think about this and the power relations between an individual so designated and the community of which they are a part. The theme culminates in Sula’s speech that you point to in closing.

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Comment on Sula, Peiss 5 and 6 by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/04/04/sula-peiss-5-and-6/#comment-36 Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:03:30 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=218#comment-36 Hi Sami,

In class, in addition to the discussion about Addie and Rebecca and how their relationship allows us to think about Nel and Sula’s, I’d like for you to pursue the theme of death in the novel. Be sure to trace the several instances involving Nel’s great grandmother, Chicken Little, Hannah, Sula, and the people from the Bottom on National Suicide Day.

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Comment on The Power of Promiscuity by Lee Quinby https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/2011/04/04/the-power-of-promiscuity/#comment-35 Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:47:38 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sexuality11/?p=220#comment-35 Hi Richard,

You might consider taking the title of this entry, “The Power of Promiscuity,” as the focus for your final essay. It would allow you to extend your insights within a comparative framework, dealing with the historical shifts that Foucault points to and two or three of the novels (or play) that we have read. In each case, the various documents and essays in Peiss provide a context that illuminates these differences. This entry is astute about the particularities of African American communities and family structures and the power relations that emerge in contrast to white American communities and family structures that the earlier works dealt with.

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