Final Project: Photo Portraits
Saturday, May 29th, 2010
The purpose of this portrait series was to investigate the way power relations fluctuate when assuming roles—the Photographer, the Subject, the Viewer—that are defined and attached to the medium of photography and how that affects the results. I’ve chosen two poses: in the first the Subject looks at the camera and, indirectly, at the Viewer; […]
Final Project: Photo Portraits
Posted in Final Projects, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva | Comments Off on Final Project: Photo Portraits
Identity or Disorder
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Though we had touched on the idea of identity in class before, I am happy that Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex throws us right into it. The debate of inter-sexuality as an “identity or disorder”, as posed by the Shenker-Osorio article, is a question still relevant today, maybe even more-so. A person’s sexual identity defines them fully in […]
Identity or Disorder
Posted in Eugenides: Middlesex, Foucault: History of Sexuality, Mila Matveeva | Comments Off on Identity or Disorder
“What I Am Is Defined by Who I Am”: Resistance in Bio-Power
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction. The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in […]
“What I Am Is Defined by Who I Am”: Resistance in Bio-Power
Tags: bio-power, HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, power relations, resistance
Posted in Foucault: History of Sexuality, Kushner: Angels in America, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva | Comments Off on “What I Am Is Defined by Who I Am”: Resistance in Bio-Power
A Woman’s Power Even in the Worst of Times
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
Though absolutely devastating and often hard to swallow, the position of enslaved African American women described by Brenda E. Stevenson in “Slave Marriage and Family Relations” evoked the kinds of power that we had read about earlier (Nancy Cott). Women had little say in determining the path of romance in their lives and would often […]
A Woman’s Power Even in the Worst of Times
Tags: Brenda E. Stevenson, Hegel, Nancy F. Cott, power relations, women
Posted in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva, Morrison: Sula | Comments Off on A Woman’s Power Even in the Worst of Times
The Confessor’s Dilemma
Sunday, April 4th, 2010
While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita my first instinct was to identify Foucault’s four strategic unities. A simple task, as it turned out, for this beautifully written text couldn’t have set up the four unities more clearly: the hysterical woman (Charlotte), the masturbating child (Dolly), the Malthusian couple (Humbert & Charlotte), and the perverse adult (Humbert […]
The Confessor’s Dilemma
Posted in Foucault: History of Sexuality, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva, Nabokov: Lolita | 2 Comments »
Horror and Vampires and What They Say About Us
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Hearing Professor Benavides’s lecture made me remember why I love the horror genre and it’s ability to jam-pack current socio-political and economic issues under masks of entertainment. As kids, my best friend and I would wait for $.99 Wednesdays to run to the corner video store and get a new horror film. From Halloween to […]
Horror and Vampires and What They Say About Us
Tags: horror, Hugo Benavides, vampires
Posted in Mila Matveeva | Comments Off on Horror and Vampires and What They Say About Us
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
In the 1892 case of Alice Mitchell in Chapter 6 of Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the author talks about “urnings”, which are individuals who are only stimulated people of the same sex, i.e. “unnatural sexual practices” (Peiss, 199). There is a parallel between sexual desire of two females and theses “unnatural […]
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Tags: Alice Mitchell, Carroll Smith-Resenberg, hysterization, scientia sexualis, women
Posted in Foucault: History of Sexuality, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva | Comments Off on Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Kathryn Bigelow’s Big Win
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Last night Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director. As you may know, the film industry is essentially a Boys Club and if you didn’t know, well, I’m afraid it is. Though this is certainly a great achievement, a ‘milestone’, not only for women, but the industry […]
Kathryn Bigelow’s Big Win
Tags: film industry, Kathryn Bigelow, scientia sexualis, Virginia Woolf, women
Posted in Mila Matveeva, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Morality as Repression; Passionlessness as Liberty
Monday, March 8th, 2010
In Nancy F. Cott’s “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850” she talks about how between 1777 and 1794, a study of nine New England magazines indicates that in nonfiction and fiction stories, regarding illicit sex, men were punished, while women were given sympathy. This is interesting for two reasons: the first being that, […]
Morality as Repression; Passionlessness as Liberty
Tags: morality, Nancy F. Cott, passionlessness, Sylvester Graham, William Alcott, women
Posted in Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva | 2 Comments »
This American Life: 81 Words
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
As the hour of last week’s This American Life was coming to close, I realized how Foucauldian this story was. “81 Words” is about how the American Psychiatric Association came to the decision to remove homosexuality as a disease from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. This tale not only deals with power […]
This American Life: 81 Words
Tags: DSM, homosexuality, NPR, scientia sexualis
Posted in Mila Matveeva, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »