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 […]
My friend recently found out that his boyfriend was diagnosed with HIV, and I was surprised by how he talked about it. “HIV isn’t really a big deal anymore. You can live with it, and the government pays your rent. But it kills you psychologically.” He spoke about the idea of living with the knowledge […]
As The Scarlett Letter was written in the Victorian Era about the Puritan Era, Sula was written about an older period of time through the lens of an more recent one. To what extent might Sula be superficially set in an older period of time, but actually concerned with society at the time the book […]
This week’s readings paid very close attention to the power relations within African American communities. The African Americans in Sula and the essays by Stevenson and Hansen were often in a position of powerlessness. Be it slavery in the South or racism in the North, whites used numerous tactics to keep positions of power over […]
(I apologize for the slight tardiness of tonight’s post–Oscar Night is the New England Holiday of my family!) Aristophane’s play, Lysistrata, is one of the most prominent literary displays of women’s sexual power. In attempts to end the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata convinces her fellow Grecian women to withhold sexual pleasures from their husbands until peace […]
The development of human intellectual capability has produced a wider range of emotions than perhaps we even have names for. Our transcendental complexities and desires have a need to be resolved that far outstrips Nature’s faculties for maintaining equilibrium in the world. In The Social Construction of Sexuality Jeffrey Weeks comments on the intrinsic […]
Although I’m not a scientist (really, really not a scientist), I found it helpful to conceptualize the ideas that Foucault presents on power in “Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality” by relating them to some basic laws of physics. Foucault’s claim that power is “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which […]
Reading the essays by Weeks and Norton both came as a bit of a shock to me after finishing Foucault’s treatise on sexuality. Foucault has developed such a comprehensive theory, but it seems to me as if neither Weeks nor Norton really knows where to place it. Foucault establishes a framework for understanding how power […]
If sex is merely a societal construct, as French philosopher Michel Foucault claims, then it would follow that sex would be viewed differently in separate cultures with their distinct social formations. By that logic, sex would be viewed in one light in France, and in another in Italy. However, Foucault presents his reasoning on the […]
The internet as it now stands, serves as a tool for accelerating the proliferation and diversification of special sexual knowledges, identities, and roles. Fitting perfectly into the framework of power Michel Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality, pornography and social media have transformed the internet into an unprecedentedly effective tool for surveillance, confession, and […]
