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 […]
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. […]
Middlesex has got to be the best book to end our semester. Not only was it actually written fairly recently (to my great surprise; the author’s style made me think the book was written in the ’80s), but the book touches on so many topics we discussed: The pros and cons of scientia sexualis; constructs […]
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, […]
I just looked at this lengthy and detailed Times article about how marriage correlates with health. It compares the first study of its kind in the 19th century with present-day conceptions of marriage and health. A very insightful read on sciencia sexualis, physical health, psychology, and personal lifestyle choices. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18marriage-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me
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 […]
Lolita as a Foucauldian Case Study Reading the introduction to Lolita invoked a strong sense of déjà vu, which I realized came from the uncanny similarities between it and “The Custom House”. Both introductions serve to set up the stories as “true” (or in terms of The Scarlet Letter, based on a true story). More […]
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 […]
I had a professor in my freshman year who loved the idea of “liminal spaces” – spots that are on both sides of something; they are neither here nor there. She loved to tell us, “It’s OK not knowing.” She loved the parts of life that were not black, that were not white, that were […]
