Category: Jaslee Carayol

Power in The Scarlett Letter Godbeer’s essay, “Sodomy in Colonial New England” posed an interesting history about the definition of sodomy and the power relations within that definition.  Previous coursework of mine (more specifically, American Legal Systems) established that sodomy was non-reproductive sex.  This definition was present in the Godbeer essay as part of the […]

Power and Problematic Sexualities Foucault finally started to make sense to me with The Deployment of Sexuality.  Maybe it’s because Part 4 is much more linear, but I am just relieved to feel a little less lost. In his “Method” section, Foucault effectively dispels the rest of the ideas I had about power in relation […]

Manga, Media, Social Construction v. Essentialism? For me, our visit to the Museum of Sex drove home some of the ideas that Weeks’ touched upon in his discussion of the social construction of sexuality.  Weeks states that sexuality is shaped and given meaning by society and that it in turn shapes each of us.  Each […]

Power, Pleasure, and Personage In Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Chapter 2 of “The Repressive Hypothesis” has an interesting take on the dynamic between power and pleasure.  Before this reading, if someone had asked me how the two aforementioned terms related to one another, my answer would have been fairly simple.  The source of the pleasure […]