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Discussion Activity Assignment Help
Task : 1
Required Readings
- Arlie Hochschild, “The Surrogate’s Womb,” Gender, Equal Opportunities, Research, 2015.
- Ava Baron, "Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historians Gaze." International Labor and Working-Class History 69, no. 1 (2006): 143-60.
Questions:
Hochschild
- In what way does Hochschild revise Marxist theory?
- Hochschild suggests there are ways that we positively detach from "everyday market life." In this she distinguishes between detachment and estrangement. What are the positive detachments she mentions? What are the estrangement?
- Is "free choice estrangement" a contradiction as Hochschild sees it?
- In this story, who are those backstage and who are those frontstage?
- According to this article, why are people afraid of government regulation of the market? Does Hochschild think the government can positively intervene and if so how?
Baron
- In this article, what does "embodiment" mean? How does considering the embodiment of the male worker change how we view the history of masculinity and the history of the workplace?
- As described in this article, how have ideals of manliness and masculinity changed over time?
- How have race and class differentiated or been used to differentiate male bodies? And how have men been subject to disciplining gazes depending on their racial and class status?
- To what extent have sexuality and homosociality figured in the understanding of men?
Task : 2
Required Readings
- Mireille Miller-Young, “Preface” and “Introduction,” A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, Duke University Press, 2014.
- Andrew Gurza, “The Price of Intimacy,” Out Magazine, 2016.
Mireille Miller-Young, “Preface” and “Introduction,”
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, Duke University Press, 2014.
- What do the “politics of respectability” and “culture of dissemblance” seek to counter?
- What is the “politics of deviance”?
- What is the “politics of subversion”?
- What are the constraints to “black women’s erotic autonomy”?
- What stereotypes about black female sexuality are black female sex workers up against?
- How did “brown sugar” “give birth to white wealth”?
- How is brown sugar a trope, and how can it be used to push back against the trope?
Andrew Gurza, “Price of Intimacy”
- What stigmas related to hiring a sex worker does this article reveal?
- In what ways, if any, does this article challenge your ideas about sexual intimacy and what it should be made up of?
- How do preconceptions and romantic ideals about sexual intimacy inform gender roles?
- How do expectations of sexual performance and body type inform ableism and disappear people with disabilities?
- What is the “price of intimacy” the author refers to?
- What kind of emotional labour might David perform as part of the service he provides?
Task : 3
Required Readings
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- Content note: discussion of rape. Roxane Gay, several excerpts from her new book Hunger. Previously published and on Leganto as: “My body is a cage of my own making,” The Guardian, July 1 2017, and “My body is wildly undisciplined and I deny myself nearly everything I desire,” xojane, April 9 2014.
- Content note: discussion of eating disorders. Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Unbearable Weight: feminism, Western culture, and the body, University of California Press, 165-184.
Questions to guide your reading:
Gay
- When Gay says that her body is a cage of her own making, and considering her story more broadly, do you think, using the ideas we learned about the shift from the self to the subject, that she is a self in control of her body, or is she a subject played on by trauma and her unconscious?
- Think about how you might apply Freud’s ideas about the superego, the ego, and the id to thinking about Roxane Gay’s discussion of her hunger.
- Consider intersectional issues in Roxane Gay’s identity. How might her intersecting identities impact her experience of the world?
- To what extent do social structures impact Gay’s lived identities?
- In what ways does Gay take a feminist approach to her body and how does her lived experience challenge that?
- In the lecture this week, we will talk about Foucault’s ideas of surveillance and biopower. After the lecture, consider how you might use Foucault to analyse Gay’s writing. Do you think Foucault’s ideas might have influenced the way she analyses her own experiences?
Bordo
- This chapter draws strongly from Foucault’s ideas of “constitutive power” and the body as a site of social control. Bordo argues that bodies are shaped into being by the organisation and regulation of time, space, and daily life. Bordo’s article is certainly located in its 1990s context, and some of you may find the way that she discusses eating disorders highly problematic. How do you think her Foucauldian approach to analysing eating disorders changes her analysis from what a Freudian psychoanalytic approach might yield? (I note that although Bordo says that the disorders she discusses have been concentrated on white middle-class women that we now know that eating disorders manifest across class and racial identification, and are not exclusively female.)
- When Bordo argues that the body is a medium of culture as well as a text of culture, a discourse, what does she mean?
- What are the connections between Bordo’s argument and Gay’s writing? Eg. How does the following statement from Bordo fit with what Gay writes about Jennifer Hudson? “Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress…we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification.” (Bordo 166)
- How does Bordo illustrate Foucault’s idea of “constitutive power”?
- What is the relationship between historical context, expectations of femininity, and the disorders Bordo discusses?
- According to Bordo, how are eating disorders both manifestations of resistance and the ways that resistance reproduces existing power relations?
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