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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I really enjoyed Tony Morrison’s Sula. It’s a unique novel in that Morrison lets the reader to a lot of work and filling in the blanks for herself. I found that both challenging and interesting especially when I was trying to recall how certain characters related to one another. Sula reminded me of Lolita in […]
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 […]
After this past class, in which we discussed Victorian Hawthorne writing about Puritans, I noticed new layers in The Scarlet Letter. In regards to the documents in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the deployment of sexuality, and power-relations, were evident. Hawthorne’s Victorian influence is seen in “Another View of Hester.” He speculates, […]
This week’s selections of readings played off each really well. From the historical excerpt of Massachusetts’s colony’s laws on sexual offenses, the overarching message is death is result of any sexual deviances away from heterosexual and martial sex in colonial America. However, that is not always the case (or even rarely the case) as evident […]
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality became much clearer after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s tale is the perfect lens through which to view juridico-discursiveness in action. I also enjoyed the added richness of the Foucauldian lens because I was reading The Scarlet Letter for the second time. This time around it was […]
The past (two) week’s class was very helpful in cementing the main points of Foucault’s concepts about power (hooray for charts). During the same week, in a gender and society class, I was introduced to intersectional theory via the text, “Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter” by Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins. […]
“Where there is power there is resistance” (Foucault 95). After reviewing my notes from our previous class, and doing Internet research on my own to clarify terms we discussed in class, I would like to discuss this quote. I will address what it means in terms of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, as well […]
