This week, reading Books Three and Four, I found that the story in Middlesex changes once Cal turns the focus on himself. “Up until now it hasn’t been my world,” he says in the beginning of Book Three (217). The story’s style and quality is right to change; it’s harder to talk about oneself than […]
As I was reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, I thought how it should have won an award for its poetic use of language, and supreme storytelling. Lo and behold I look at the cover and discover that the book had won the Pulitzer Prize. In Middlesex, Foucault’s subjectivity of bodies takes on a new element. What […]
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 […]
Sula is a gorgeous book to read, and it I am glad I had the documents and Foucault to offer additional insight. Toni Morrision does a good job portraying Sula in all her shades of gray. I found that I was slow to judge her (and the rest of the characters) because of our other […]
Oh Lolita, my Lolita, I have begun to feel for you! Dear Humbert was endearing and charming when his having Lo was but a fantasy. However, what I read in Part Two of Lolita eroded my warm feelings toward Humbert Humbert. How could they not when he admitted to threatening Dolores for sex? “I relied […]
Lolita, Lo-lee-ta, Lo. Lee. Ta. I love it—I love this book! Vladamir Nabokov gets into your head and leaves behind Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. What a magnificent novel to read, especially in light of Foucault, and refreshing after the more restrained The Scarlet Letter. And yet, after visiting The Museum of Sex, there is no way […]
My notion of the Victorian lifestyle has been shattered. Gone are the images of couples cold to one another in bed, and a society as tight as the petticoats the women wore. Replace it with sexually charged men and women who were not abashed to share their feelings with one another, and radical thinkers espousing […]
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, […]
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 […]
“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 […]
