Blood Wanted: No Gay Men Need Apply This past week I went to donate blood for the first time. As I filled out an extensive questionnaire meant to ensure my donated blood would not pass on infectious diseases, I noticed the official list of people who may not donate blood. It banned people with certain […]
Be Firm, O’ Letter A I have loved Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for as long as I can remember – until now. I forgot that when I read it, I always skip the integral – but long-winded and dull – introduction. But read it I did for this class, and I found I was […]
The third of Foucault “strategic unities” (103) for knowledge and power over and about sex is “a socialization of procreative behavior” (104) for partners in relationships. The socialization is, in essence, all the factors “brought to bear on the fertility of couples” (104-105). This is a discussion worth bringing into the present, and into present […]
The two essays we read for this week from Kathy Peiss’s book, by Weeks and Norton respectively, seem to be a case of social constructivism versus essentialism. Weeks argues that sexuality – not the less ambiguous word “sex” – is not something natural, a biological function to be examined by scientists (as Foucault’s scientia sexualis, […]
Obsession for Confession We discussed confessions in class today — at churches, in therapy, and even on Facebook. PostSecret is another form of confession: People send in their secrets on postcards to a specified address, and the founder of PostSecret, Frank Warren, posts select ones online. He has also published several books of postcards secrets.
During my reading of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, I felt like I was missing something – like the entire book made almost-sense: a puzzle with the central piece missing. So I went to Wikipedia to look up a bit more about Foucault (yes, I know, we should always research an author before reading a […]
