“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 […]
The theme of the monster, that John pointed out in our last class, continues to resurface throughout Books 3 and 4 of Middlesex. What is interesting to note is that the point when Cal finally accepts him/herself as a unique being, not a monster, is when his/her body is displayed in a freak show of […]
Incest, Middlesex, and Intersex Having only read the first two books of Middlesex, I feel this post must be about incest, a topic that Eugenides handles with incredible grace and tenderness.
One time, a professor told us about a series of ten confirmed genders that lie on a spectrum between “male” and “female.” This is per the scarce liberal arms of the scientia sexualis establishment. In the years since I acquired this information, I have hazily wondered why there are only restrooms designated for two genders. […]
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 […]
Once again the definition of the label “homosexual” is questioned and placed on the examining table in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.” (Millenium Approaches, 46) This quote is part of a striking dialogue between Roy Cohn, a […]
The opening description of Medallion provides a description of power relations in clear contrast with what we had been discussing during our last class; the physical representation is reversed, since the black residents of Medallion (on a hill) look down on the white residents of the valley below them. When this reverse physical representation is […]
Dolores, or Lolita Something very intriguing to me in Nabokov’s Lolita is the fact that Humbert Humbert needed to create a separate identity for Dolores (much like, as Jaslee pointed out, he needs to create “nymphets” to rationalize his lust for young girls.) To him, Dolores is hardly ever Dolores – she is sometimes Lo, […]
Identity and Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies In this week’s Peiss readings we get some concrete facts and history to support what Foucault had mentioned in The History of Sexuality – the fact that sexual abnormality was often tolerated by villagers/townspeople during the Puritan era, even though legal codes created by the religious and political […]
Here is the compiled slideshow for my amateur photoshoot at the the Museum of Sex. Super-Cultural Constructs The first class discussion on Foucault left me reeling, because I could not understand how I had missed or completely misinterpreted some of his most emphasized points. Granted, reading on a crowded train doesn’t help, but neither does […]
