GEN210 2018 Reading Gender in Everyday Life Research Essay Proposal & Questions - Research Essay Writing Assignment Help

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Reading Gender in Everyday Life Research Essay Proposal and Research Essay Questions

Essay questions:  

1. How does language construct gender?
2. In what ways has the two-sex model of gender been challenged?
3. In what ways have bodies been determined “good” or “bad”/ “healthy” or “sick”?
4. Angela King has argued that “despite his preoccupation with power and its effects on the body, Foucault’s own analysis was curiously gender-neutral.” Yet Foucault’s ideas may be used, productively, to discuss the ways that the female body has been disciplined. Discuss and analyse.
5. Patricia Collins has written that: “surveillance seems designed to produce a particular effect—Black women remain visible yet silenced; their bodies become written by other texts, yet they remain powerless to speak for themselves.” How is surveillance both racialized and gendered?
6. Following Laura Mulvey’s argument that the gaze is male, Sandra Bartky has argued that “In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgement. Woman lives her body as seen by another.” Nicholas Mirzoeff challenges the notion that the gaze is always a tool of domination and control when he argues for “the right to look.” Analyse and discuss.
7. Compare and contrast themes of surveillance, the gaze, and the monstrous in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In.
8. Is a transformation of the body always about biopower, a regulation of one’s own body to fit imposed norms, or is there a possibility for agency?
9. In what ways do intersectional identities affect attitudes about and the experience of reproduction? What does that say about the ways in which reproduction is socially determined?
10. Ava Baron has written that “Research now demonstrates that the workplace is a key site for the construction of masculinity and male identity.” Analyse and discuss the relationship between masculinity and labour.
11. How do intersecting identities construct each other? What kinds of social hierarchies can form as the result?
12. Anti-porn feminists have argued that pornography and sex work commodify women’s bodies and in doing so subordinate them. Yet Mireille Miller-Young has argued that for black women, even within material constraints, sex work is a form of “illicit eroticism” that enables resistance. And Andrew Gurza has written about being a queer, disabled man and the liberation he was given by a sex worker. To what extent can sex work be liberatory?
13. What makes queer theory different from conventional thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality? With that in mind, what does queer theory bring to an analysis of normative gender and sexuality?
14. In what ways are ideas about sexuality central to formations of the state and ideas about citizenship?
15. Jordy Silverstein and Mary Tomsic have argued that marriage is “an institution that has often been used to control, direct, sanction, and unfairly deny types of relationships between certain people and within certain groups.” Analyse and discuss.
16. Kate Gleeson has argued that “It would appear that we could only begin to make true sense of the sexual abuse of boys in the era of feminism having been released from its reactive struggle against the medical and psychotherapeutic disciplines. Undoubtedly, however, the most crucial factor was the decriminalization of men’s homosexual sex, and the gender-neutral rape laws that accompanied it.” Analyse.
17. What role does religion play in organizing gender, sexuality, and inequality?
18. To what extent does gender affirmation surgery confront naturalised ideas about gender?
19. How have analyses of hysteria and/or other mental illnesses contributed to our understanding of gender identity?

Please note that you are welcome to adjust any of the questions to focus on identities that are of interest to you, and I can then help you get started with the research for that.