Gender and Sexuality

Sex + American identity

What is the relationship between American identity, inequity and marginalization, and normative definitions of race/gender/sex?

Judith Butler theorizes gender as performative, a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ that forms a powerful fiction that organizes society according to a binary. However, though gender may be an historical fiction, it is very real in its effects and consequences. According to Hortense Spillers and Roderick Ferguson, gender, race and sexuality are deeply intertwined; together, they contribute to definitions of citizen and outsider, good and deviant, ‘body’ and flesh’.

Explain the central argument of each text (Butler’s theory of gender, Spillers’ analysis of the Moynihan report, and Ferguson’s critique of knowledge). Using their theories and 1-2 news articles from the past 12 months to anchor your essay, answer the question above. Your news article(s) must be full news/journalistic articles (not opinion pieces) from a major publication (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Atlantic, etc). You will use the texts’ arguments to explain the news story in relation to American identity and histories of race, gender and sex. Be sure to use the texts provide a definition of American identity (according to the authors).

600-700 words.

Re: Ferguson Reading

You can address the prompt by focusing on sections (or a section) of the Intro chapter (read the Preface as well – it’s short and sets up the argument). Below is a reading guide for where to focus on skip.

Read the Preface (skip last two paragraphs with the ‘thanks’)
For Intro:
read intro section (first 3 paragraphs of chapter)
read ‘Queer of color and the critique of lib cap’
skip ‘To disidentify with hist mat’
your choice for ‘The multiplications of surplus’ but if you read it, start from after block quote on pg 12 (paragraph starts at “The universality of the citizen…”) and read through paragraph above block quote on pg 15 (paragraph ends “…critiques of state capital”)
read ‘Epistemology, political econ, and reg’
‘Culture, heterogen, and rupture’ is the last section. I’d suggest reading this first so you know where the argument is going, but you don’t necessarily need it for the essay. The first two paragraphs are a good summary (sub ‘novel’ for ‘culture’ if it’s helpful since you’re not reading the chapters where he does literary analysis); stop on p 27 at the paragraph that starts “In chapter 1…” but read the last two paragraphs of the chapter on p 29.