Professor Lee Quinby – Spring 2012

Posts Tagged: Foucault


Posts Tagged ‘Foucault’

A Girl’s Guide to Happiness (As Seen on TV)

Hey everyone! Here’s  my video and write up. I’ll miss our wonderful class!!   Originally, I intended to create a visual representation of the deployment of sexuality described in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. I wanted to display the ways in which different discourses in the media have represented sexuality and influenced me […]

Biopower with a capital B

According to Michel Foucault, “biopower” emerged as the deployment of alliance and its complementary sovereign power over death (to allow or disallow life) shifted to the deployment of sexuality and accompanying power over life on the individual bodily level and on a larger population level (138-139). Foucault continues with that this power over life uses […]

Directions to the Inside

I think maybe all of the gender theory I have been reading for another class has gotten to me because I found myself increasingly frustrated with Cal’s characterization of gender and sex. I also, however, don’t have a solution for the ways in which society in general is stuck in the binary of male or […]

Deconstructing “The Norm”

So sorry for the late post!! Finals time is starting to take over! I am absolutely loving Middlesex. I think it’s amazing that Eugenides is able to take such a powerful taboo right from the very beginning and make us (well at least me) root for the characters involved. Lefty and Desdemona’s relationship has all […]

Cultural contradictions in Middlesex

As I was reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, I thought how it should have won an award for its poetic use of language, and supreme storytelling. Lo and behold I look at the cover and discover that the book had won the Pulitzer Prize. In Middlesex, Foucault’s subjectivity of bodies takes on a new element. What […]

Approaching ‘Angels’ Curious, but Wary

The first time I heard about Angels in America was when my ninth grade English class read The Laramie Project. At the time, the play was an unapproachable feat of the struggle to be gay in America, and the AIDS epidemic. I didn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole because I was afraid […]

Agency and the Limitations of Claiming an Identity

I saw Angels in America performed last year and reading the plays has been an entirely new experience. Reading the plays as literary pieces has opened up opportunities to carefully examine the many meanings within lines or within single words. This course has influenced my perceptions about a number of things, but Foucault’s discussions of […]

Constructing Sexuality

After visiting the Museum of Sex in combination with reading Lolita and this weeks documents I have noticed a strong trend in sexuality -the attempt to construct some ideal that arises from an illusion/fantasy. In the museum I was struck by the simulator in the BDSM exhibit on the second floor. This sort of “create […]

So That’s What the Victorians Did

My notion of the Victorian lifestyle has been shattered. Gone are the images of couples cold to one another in bed, and a society as tight as the petticoats the women wore. Replace it with sexually charged men and women who were not abashed to share their feelings with one another, and radical thinkers espousing […]

Overwhelming Deployment

At the end of our discussion last week, Professor Quinby prompted us to think about how Foucault’s notion of the deployment of sexuality shows up in our readings. I want to focus primarily on this weeks essays as I found them really interesting and a good springboard for discussion about the Scarlet Letter in class. […]