For this film I was inspired by a concept we discussed in class when reading The Scarlett Letter. This was the dynamic of the power triangle in which two men (in The Scarlett Letter it is Chillingworth and Dimmesdale) are brought close together because of their obsession with a woman. In Quicksilver Collides […]
Volunteer Request: Sexual Violence Training Program http://macaulay.cuny.edu/community/now/2013/05/volunteer-request-sexual-violence-training-program/ The New York Asian Women’s Center in partnership with the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be conducting a training to build awareness of and change attitudes and responses to sexual assault among students in New York City […]
This is a dance of undoing, unraveling the psychic and social knots we harbor around sexuality. This is a dance of liberation, the freedom to be fully human and the freedom to recognize all those who you encounter as something so much more than their roles, a dance where we discover each other as mutual […]
Hey everybody, I’m so sorry and disappointed to have missed everyone’s presentations this week. I was, and am only just beginning to recover, from being sick to the point of incapacitation. I’m sure it was an inspiring class session and I look forward, at least, to reading everyone’s work following the semester’s end. I’m writing […]
Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through […]
It is a testament to the crude fascination of scientia sexualis that with such a novel case of gender identity, everyone was busy trying to collect and examine the physical details of Christine Jorgensen’s life. This is epitomized in Document 3’s text from a Time’s article:“The New York Post put the facts on the […]
Cal’s story traces the lines of her life through the well-trodden path of a young girl’s development, suddenly shifting towards the well-worn path of adolescent boys, but stops and hovers in the middle. He did not have to struggle to break gender boundaries. In a very real sense, it came naturally. Cal’s story is harder […]
Though viewed as a medical spectacle, hermaphrodites are more readily accepted into society than transsexuals. Those born with mixed genitalia are regarded as having been born that way, destined by God to occupy a place on the fringes of mainstream society. However, transsexuals are viewed in a harsher light, as critics claim that it is […]
Middlesex questions and attacks the notion of identity. It demonstrates how our sexual identity reaches far beyond so-called “orientation” and takes root in race, gender and family relations. The first half of the book closely follows the structure of a kinship alliance. Desdemona and Lefty demonstrate loyalty to their Greek heritage, perhaps Desdemona moreso than […]
In last week’s class, Lee proposed a great question that we didn’t talk too much about, so I’ve decided to use it as the launch point for this week’s readings (particularly that of the last two books of Middlesex). The question was something along these lines: Is it important for an author to have an […]
