Posts Tagged: homosexuality

Spring Fever PANIC! Reading: Sexuality and Resistance as Living Literature             Our philosophical and historical discussion of sexuality in American culture has been informed by renowned and canonized fiction, as well as scientific contexts and personal documents.  This PANIC! reading project is a blend of theories, realities, fictions, and confessions in a theatrical, real-time, literary […]

Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition For my creative project, I chose to create a board game – Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition. Initially, my intent was to create a game that would test the knowledge our class gained over the course of the semester in a fun, nontraditional way. However, I […]

“Can transvestites be cured?” asked Time in an article reporting on Christine Jorgensen (Peiss, 375). If the article were about Cal, perhaps the question asked would be: Can hermaphrodites be cured? Within these questions lies the assumption that these things – these genders – need to be cured. “In some cases of transvestitism, as in […]

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 […]

Finding Angels in a World of Loss The angelic prophecy has been revealed, and it has been rejected—by its own would-be prophet, Prior Walter.  The prophecy is to just stop: to stop moving and migrating and changing, and if that happens, maybe God will return.  Prior finds this prophecy a farce at best, dangerous at […]

Hello Class, I’m reposting this in case anyone is interested in attending the reading I will be recording for my final project.  The reading is this Wednesday at 8 PM.  Each reader will read a ten minute erotica piece, and series host Charlie Vasquez will make many exciting literary announcements.  Please feel free to e-mail […]

Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is heavy on sexuality, disease, politics, professional discrimination, religion, race, and gender.  The two themes that stick out most to me are sexuality and gender.  The portrayal of the Jewish identity as ethnicity versus religion is very realistic for the modern day, and it is not a treatment […]

Families with Fluid Boundaries The way power was used in Ronald Bayer’s essay, AIDS and the Bathhouse Controversy was quite interesting.  Essentially, the question was whether the San Francisco government could control the private lives of gay individuals in the name of public health.  As stated in the essay, the criminalization of homosexuality by the […]

Response to Angels in America “Roy: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that” (Millennium Approaches, Act 1, […]

Or You Can Just Blame Your Mother… The Alfred Kinsey and US Senate reading this week seem the paramount example of scientia sexualis; numbers, facts, and (false) theories predominate in both pieces. But what interested me the most was the “blame game.” According to Kinsey, “disapproval of heterosexual coitus…before marriage is often an important factor […]