Case Study Essay
Pick One: (Total word limit 1500)
In what ways does Willa Cather’s (1905) short story Paul’s Case bear out Foucault’s (1978) argument in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1? Illustrate with reference to the text.
Notes:
See Week 2 Materials/ Readings
Useful link for this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willa_Cather
Normative sexual and gender identities depend for their coherence and stability on the repudiation of a marked, abject other – a devalued category which forms the ‘constitutive outside’ of the normative identity. Illustrate with reference to everyday discourses that surround a sexual or gender identity of your choice.
Richard Dyer discusses how popular cultural representations ‘perform heterosexuality … in such remorseless, crazed and alarmed modes that they suggest heterosexuality is indeed on a hiding to nothing in its assertion of its own naturalness and normality’ (1997, p. 272). Discuss, with reference to the context of Dyer’s argument and a cultural representation of your choice (taken from film, TV, popular media, fiction, etc.).
Notes:
See Week 3 Materials/ Readings
In a 1981 interview, Foucault remarked, ‘the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process’. How does the problematization of (homo)sexuality limit the possibilities of friendship? Illustrate with reference to examples of your choice.
Notes:
Based on brief research for this question, the interview was actually conducted in 1982.
I’ve attached another document called “Help with Q4” that is of an article called “30-Friends” which might help to answer this question.
Below is a section of dialogue copied from the interview with Foucault (M.F.) with questions asked from an interviewee (Q) on the topic of “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” – Page 170 – 171
Full text in link below:
https://monoskop.org/images/0/00/Foucault_Michel_Ethics_Subjectivity_and_Truth.pdf
Q. You mentioned in an interview in Gai Pied a year or two ago that what upsets people most about gay relations is not so much sexual acts per se but the potential for affectional relationships carried on outside the normative patterns. These friendships and networks are unforeseen. Do you think what frightens people is the unknown potential of gay relations, or would you suggest that these relations are seen as posing a direct threat to social institutions?
M.F.: One thing that interests me now is the problem of friendship. For centuries after antiquity, friendship was a very important kind of social relation: a social relation within which people had a certain free-dom, certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. There were also economic and social implications to these relationships-they were obliged to help their friends, and so on. I think that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see these kinds of friendships disappearing, at least in the male society. And friendship begins to become something other than that. You can find, from the sixteenth century on, texts that explicitly criticize friendship as something dangerous.
The army, bureaucracy, administration, universities, schools, and so on-in the modern senses of these words-cannot function with such intense friendships. I think there can be seen a very strong attempt in all these institutions to diminish or minimize the affectional relations. I think this is particularly important in schools. When they started grade schools with hundreds of young boys, one of the problems was how to prevent them not only from having sex, of course, but also from developing friendships. For instance, you could study the strategy of Jesuit institutions about this theme of friendship, since the Jesuits knew very well that it was impossible for them to suppress this. Rather, they tried to use the role of sex, of love, of friendship, and at the same time to limit it. I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships. That history is very, very important.
And one of my hypotheses, which I am sure would be borne out if we did this, is that homosexuality became a problem-that is, sex between men became a problem-in the eighteenth century. We see the rise of it as a problem with the police, within the justice system, and so on. I think the reason it appears as a problem, as a social issue, at this time is that friendship had disappeared. As long as friendship was some-thing important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together. You couldn’t say that men didn’t have sex together-it just didn’t matter. It had no social implication; it was culturally accepted. Whether they fucked together or kissed had no importance. Absolutely no importance. Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose: “What is going on between men?” And that’s when the problem appears. And if men fuck together, or have sex together, that now appears as a problem. Well, I’m sure I’m right, that the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process.
Topics
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: ‘The Will to Know”: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Week 3: Sex/Gender/Desire
Week 4: Identity and its others
Week 5: Sexing Bodies
Readings (For Each Topic)
WEEK 1
(Required)
Article: Sticks and Stones and Stereotypes – by Morris, Meaghan – Australian Humanities Review1997
(Recommended)
Book Chapter: Queer – Queer theory by Jagose, Annamarie Carlton, Vic Melbourne University Press 199672 – 100
Book Chapter: Queer and now – Tendencies by Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Durham Duke University Press 19931 – 20
WEEK 2
(Required)
Article: McWhorter, L. (1994). Foucault’s genealogy of homosexuality (Links to an external site.). Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, 6(1/2), 44-58.
Book Chapter: Foucault, M. (1976). ‘The Perverse Implantation’. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Penguin pp.36-50
Book Chapter: Cather, W. (1905). Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament. (Links to an external site.). (pp. 116-36). SS McClure.
(Recommended)
Article: Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Across Genders and Sexualities: Willa Cather and others. In Tendencies, Duke UP, pp. 167-176.
Book Extract: Halperin, D. (1995) Saint Foucault: towards a gay hagiography – 1952-New York Oxford University Press Total Pages 246, pp 15-62.
Book Chapter: Views from the Site of Political Oppression – Bodies and pleasures: Foucault and the politics of sexual normalization by McWhorter, Ladelle, 1960-Bloomington, Ind Indiana University Press19991 – 33
Book: Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s History of sexuality and the colonial order of things Stoler, Ann Laura.DurhamDuke University Press1995
Book Chapter: Chapter Scientia Sexual is – The history of sexuality by Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984.1st Vintage Books ed. New York Vintage Books 198851 – 73
Book: Spaces between us queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization Morgensen, Scott Lauria. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 2011
WEEK 3
(Required)
Book Chapter: Richard Dyer, 1997. ‘Heterosexuality’, Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction. A. Medhurst & S.Munt (eds.). London: Cassell, 261-273.
Book Extract: Butler, J. (2011). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. (Links to an external site.) Routledge. 1-10
(Recommended)
Article: Critically Queer – Butler, Judith GLQ1 (1)1993-1117 – 32
Article: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980) – Rich, Adrienne Cecile Journal of women’s history15(3)200311 – 48
Additional content:
Useful links (Judith Butler):
Judith Butler Explained with Cats
Categorizing sexuality:
From E K Sedgwick (1990) Epistemology of the Closet, p. 8
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire:
I “Women” as the subject of feminism
II The compulsory order of sex/gender/desire
WEEK 4
(Required)
Article: Pascoe, C. J. (2005). ‘Dude, you’re a fag’: Adolescent masculinity and the fag discourse (Links to an external site.). Sexualities, 8 (3), 329-346.
Article: Griffin C. Absences that Matter: Constructions of Sexuality in Studies of Young Women’s Friendships (Links to an external site.). Feminism & Psychology. 2000;10(2):227-245.
Book Extract: Eribon, D. (2004) ‘The shock of insult’. In Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Duke University Press.
(Recommended)
Book Extract: Sedgwick, E. K. (2015). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. Columbia university press p. 1-27.
Article: Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. Social perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies; A reader, 1, 100-133.
Article: Girls Want Sex, Boys Want Love: Resisting Dominant Discourses of (Hetero) Sexuality – Allen, Louisa Sexualities 6 (2) 2003-05215 – 236
Article: Eve’s Triangles, or Queer Studies Beside Itself – Wiegman, Robyn Differences (Bloomington, Ind.) 26 (1) 2015-0548 – 73
Book Chapter: Performing Disidentifications – Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics by Muñoz, José Esteban. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 19991 – 34
Book: – The Erotic Life of Racism – Sharon Patricia Holland Durham Duke University Press 2012
WEEK 5
(Required)
Article: Chase, C. (1998) ‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 4:189–211.
Article: Butler, J. (2001). Doing justice to someone: Sex reassignment and allegories of transsexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7(4), 621-636.
(Recommended)
N/A
Additional content:
Useful links:
Last Completed Projects
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