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80 Cards in this Set

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What is a "Boston Marriage"?
a monogamous relationship of long standing between two single women, who were usually financially independent and often shared interests in culture, feminist issues, the betterment of society, and professional careers. Impossible to know how many of them included sex.
What is homophobic reading?
A reading informed by the fear and loathing of homosexuality.
What is homophobia?
Generally used to refer to an individual's pathological dread of same-sex love.
What is institutionalized discrimination?
Discrimination that is built into a culture's laws and customs.
What is internalized homophobia?
The self-hatred some gay people experience because in their growth through adolescence to adulthood, they've internalized the homophobia pressed on them by heterosexual America.
What is heterosexism?
Privileging heterosexuality that accompanies the institutionalized discrimination against homosexuality.
What is compulsory heterosexuality?
The enormous pressure to be heterosexual placed on young people by their families, schools, the church, the medical professions, and all forms of the media.
What is heterocentrism?
The assumption, often unconscious, that heterosexuality is the universal norm by which everyone's experience can be understood.
What is biological essentialism?
The idea that a fixed segment of the population is naturally gay, just as the rest of the population is naturally heterosexual.
What is social constructionism and how does it relate to LGQ Theory?
The idea that homosexuality and heterosexuality are products of social, not biological, forces.
What are minority views and how does it relate to LGQ Theory?
Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on their minority status.
What are universalizing views and how does it relate to LGQT?
Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on the homosexual potential in all people.
What does homoerotic mean?
Homoerotic denotes erotic (though not necessarily overtly sexual) depictions that imply same-sex attraction or that might appeal sexually to a same-sex reader.
What does homosocial mean?
Homosocial denotes same-sex friendship of the kind seen in female- or male-bonding activities.
What is lesbian criticism concerned with?
Lesbian criticism is concerned with issues of personal identity and politics analogous to those analyzed by feminists. They address issues related to both sexism and heterosexism. Look at the social, economic, and political oppression fostered not only by patriarchal male privilege, but by heterosexual privilege as well.
What is the best way to define lesbian?
A woman whose sexual desire is directed toward women. This definition allows us to recognize lesbian existence even within the confines of heterosexual marriage.
Why were lesbian relationships hard to recognize in previous literary works?
Given the nineteenth century's restriction of women's sexuality and sexual awareness, many women might have had enormous sexual desire for other women without ever recognizing it as such.
What does woman-identified woman mean?
The lesbian identity is not restricted to the sexual domain but consists of directing the bulk of one's attention and emotional energy to other women and having other women as one's primary source of emotional sustenance and psychological support.
What does lesbian continuum mean?
A range through each women's life and throughout history of woman identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. Woman identification does not preclude sexual desire or sexual activity but neither does it require them.
What do lesbians deny patriarchy?
They deny patriarchy heterosexuality; this is a powerful tool because heterosexuality is not a natural sexual orientation for normal women but a political institution that subordinates women to patriarchy in that women's subservience to men is built into heterosexual definitions of female sexuality.
What does separatist mean?
Some lesbians are separatists; they disassociate themselves from all men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well. Lesbian is more than an issue of personal sexuality to separatists, it is a political stance.
What does macho mean?
Macho = "real" man. In Mexican and South American cultures, as a macho, a man can have sex with both men and women and not be considered what North Americans call homosexual (never allowing himself to be penetrated orally or anally).
What is gay sensibility?
An awareness of being different, at least in certain ways, from the members of the mainstream, dominant culture, and the complex feelings that result from an implicit, ongoing social oppression.
What are the three domains of gay sensibility?
Drag, camp, and dealing with the issue of AIDS. All involve the responses to heterosexist oppression.
What does drag mean?
Drag is the practice of dressing in women's clothing. Drag queens are gay men who dress in drag on a regular basis or who do it professionally. Drag doesn't necessarily involve and perhaps never involves the fantasy that one is a woman, it is a way for a man to express his feminine side, his outrageousness, or his nonconformity. Also is a way to draw attention to gay issues.
What does camp mean?
Flamboyant gay drag is an example; it is a form of expression characterized by irreverence, artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality. It is a way of affirming one's differences from heterosexual culture. It is a way of disarming heterosexism and healing oneself through laughter.
What is the situation with AIDS?
AIDS was not funded until it began to affect the heterosexual population. It was first identified in 1981.
What do gay critics attempt to do with literary pieces?
They attempt to determine what might constitute a gay poetics, or a way of writing that is uniquely gay; to establish a gay literary tradition; and to decide what writers and works belong to that tradition.
Why is the word queer used?
Queer can be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the word from what has been its homophobic usage in order to demonstrate that heterosexists shouldn't be allowed to define gay and lesbian experience.
What does queer stand for?
It is an inclusive category for referring to a common political or cultural ground shared by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and all people who consider themselves, for whatever reasons, nonstraight. Seeks to heal these divisions by offering a collective identity to which all nonstraight people can belong.
How does queer theory define individual sexuality?
Queer theory builds on deconstruction's insights into human subjectivity (selfhood) as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic, collectivity of possible "selves". Gay sexuality, lesbian sexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality are, for all of us, possibilities along a continuum of sexual possibilities.
What does object choice mean?
It means that heterosexual and homosexual reduce sexuality to the biological sex of one's partner.
How might sexuality be defined according to Queer theory?
The definition of one's sexuality might be based on one's preference for particular acts, sensations, or physical types.
How does queer theory define the origin of sexuality?
Queer theory supports the idea that our sexuality is socially constructed to the extent that it is based on the way in which sexuality is defined by the culture in which we live.
How does the belief that sexuality is socially constructed help us understand literature from the past?
It makes us think not only about our definitions of sexuality, but also in terms of those definitions operating in the culture from which the literature emerged.
What does queer criticism attempt to do?
Queer criticism reads texts to reveal the problematic quality of their representations of sexual categories. Shows the various ways in which the categories homosexual and heterosexual break down, overlap, or do not adequately represent the dynamic range of human sexuality.
What is homosocial bonding?
The depiction of strong emotional ties between same-sex characters can create a homosocial atmosphere that may be subtly or overtly homoerotic.
What are gay or lesbian signs?
There are two types. The first type consists of characteristics that heterosexist culture stereotypically associates with gay men or lesbians. The second type are coded signs created by the gay or lesbian subculture itself.
What are same-sex doubles?
A form of gay and lesbian signs. It consists of same-sex characters who look alike, act alike, or have parallel experiences. Same-sex characters who function as some sort of 'mirror image' of each other. May share a homoerotic bond, a homosocial bond, or they may not know each other at all
What is transgressive sexuality?
A text's focus on transgressive sexuality, including transgressive heterosexuality (such as extramarital romance), throws into question the rules of traditional heterosexuality and thus opens the door of imagination to transgressive sexualities of all kinds.
What is racialism?
The belief in racial superiority, inferiority, and purity based on the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics, just like physical characteristics, are biological properties that differentiate the races.
What is racism?
Racism refers to the unequal power relations that grow from the sociopolitical domination of one race by another and that result in systematic discriminatory practices.
What must you need to be racist?
One has to be in a position of power as a member of the politically dominant group. Racism can occur on a regular basis only when those who do it can expect to get away with it. If they are a member of the group in power chances are they will successfully get away with it.
What is institutionalized racism?
The incorporation of racist policies and practices in the institutions by which a society operates: education, federal, state, and local governments, health care, etc.
What is the Western literary cannon dominated by?
It has been dominated by a Eurocentric definition of universalism: literary works have been defined as great art, as "universal" - relevant to the experience of all people - and included in the canon only when they reflect European experience and conform to the style and subject matter of the European literary tradition, that is when they resemble other European works deemed "great".
What is Eurocentrism?
Eurocentrism is the belief that European culture is vastly superior to all others.
What is internalized racism?
Internalized racism results from the psychological programming by which a racist society indoctrinates people of color to believe in white superiority.
What is intra-racial racism?
Intra-racial racism refers to discrimination within the black community against those with darker skin and more African features.
What is double consciousness or double vision?
The awareness of belonging to two conflicting cultures: the African culture, which grew from African roots and was transformed by its own unique history on American soil, and the European culture imposed by white America. For writers, double consciousness has meant having to decide whether to write primarily for a black audience, a white audience, or both.
Why did African Americans begin to write?
Largely in an effort of African slaves to prove their humanity to whites. They were able to learn how to write despite the fact that slaveholders made it illegal for slaves to learn how to read! Narratives had to be prefaced by white patrons testifying to the authenticity of the text.
How have Afro-American critics analyzed literary texts?
They have analyzed the ways in which literary texts undermine or reinforce the racist ideologies that have kept black Americans politically oppressed and economically disadvantaged.
What did African Americans say in opposition to the notion of "universality" of all "great" literature?
Many writers in the Black Arts Movement argued that African American literature has its own unique qualities, its own politics and poetics, that cannot be fully explained by or contained within the larger framework of European American literature.
What does Afrocentricity of African American texts mean?
Afrocentricity refers to the primacy of their relationship to African history and culture- must not be overlooked when we interpret them or we risk deforming African American literature in very important ways.
What do European American folklorists say in opposition to Afrocentricity?
They assume that enslavement had abolished African Americans' cultural ties to Africa, argued that these tales derived from the European American tradition. Also said the slaves transformed the tales to fulfill a psychological need to compensate for their powerlessness.
What do African and African American tales have in common?
They both are trickster tales that revolve around behaviors designed to compensate for chronic shortages of material necessities and existence in a rigid social hierarchy. Welfare of the community always took precedence over individual gain in African tales. African Americans transformed the tales but did not separate African American culture from its African roots.
Is racial injustice still a major and pressing problem?
Yes, it is simply less visible than it used to be.
What are the basic tenets of Critical Race Theory?
1. Everyday racism is a common, ordinary experience for people of color in the United States. 2. Racism is largely the result of interest convergence, sometimes referred to as material determinism. Race is socially constructed. 4. Racism often takes the form of differential racialization. 5. Everyone's identity is a product of intersectionality. 6. The experiences of racial minorities have given them what might be called a unique voice of color.
What is everyday racism?
Being followed in a store due to race, hearing sarcastic comments at their expense, assumed language deficiency, assumed ability to speak for their entire race, feeling threatened by their skin color, etc.
What is interest convergence?
It means that racism is common because it often converges, or overlaps, with the interest-with something needed or desired - of a white individual or group.
What is material determinism?
The desire to advance oneself in the material world- for example, financially or to feel better about oneself psychologically- determines the ways in which the dominant society practices racism.
What pushed the Brown vs. Board of Education law to pass?
The negative press reports and letters indicating that the United States desperately needed to change its racist world image if it wanted to compete successfully with communist countries for the allegiance of uncommitted Third World countries, many of which were peopled by nonwhite inhabitants.
What is the social construction of race?
Our definitions of race change as economic and social pressure change. The fact that really everyone seemed and still seems to fit into a single racial category is really the result of the system of racial classification used in the United States.
Is race a biological concept?
No, race is not a scientifically supportable concept. 75 percent of all genes are identical in all individuals regardless of the population to which they are socially assigned. There is no gene for race.
What is differential racialization?
Differential racialization refers to the fact that the dominant society racializes (defines the racial characteristics of) different minority groups (in different ways) at different times, in response to shifting needs.
What is intersectionality?
Intersectionality refers to the fact that race intersects with class, sex, sexual orientation, political orientation, and personal history in forming each person's complex identity. This means that it is difficult to know the reason they are encountering discrimination in any given instance.
What does voice of color mean?
The voice of color- the enhanced ability to speak and write about race and racism due to the experience of racial oppression - is socially, not biologically acquired. The voice of color is not an inborn or genetic quality.
What does white privilege mean?
White privilege stands for the social advantages, benefits, and courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race. It is a form of everyday racism because the whole notion of privilege rests on the concept of disadvantage. White people have the luxury of not having to notice or think about race.
What is the problem with liberalism? Give example.
The problem with liberalism is how steps are being taken towards racial justice but they are taking too few and taking them too slowly. Brown vs. Board of Education, it desegregated the schools by law but not by poverty.
What is racial idealism?
The conviction that racial equality can be achieved by changing people's (often unconscious) racist attitudes through such means as education, campus codes against racist speech, positive media representations of minority groups and the use of the law.
What is racial realism?
The conviction that racial equality will never be achieved in the United States and that African Americans should, therefore, stop believing that it will. They are working towards a different prize; a strengthened humanity and moral triumph of facing the realities of and continuing to struggle against racism in all its forms without the illusion that the white power will ever be dismantled.
What are the two prominent features of African American literary tradition?
Orality and folk motifs are the two prominent features of African American literary tradition.
What is orality?
The spoken quality of its language, gives a literary work a sense of immediacy, of human presence, by giving readers the feeling they are heading a human voice. Achieved through the use of Ebonics, repetition of important phrases and voices. These devices are associated with church sermons, blues, jazz, and rap music.
What are folk motifs in African American literary tradition?
Character types: The local healer, the conjurer, the matriarch, the local storyteller, the trickster, the religious leader, and the folk hero.
Folk practices: singing worksongs, hymns, and the blues; engaging in folk and religious rituals as a way of maintaining community and continuity with the past; storytelling as a way of relating personal and group history and passing down traditional wisdom; passing down folk crafts and skills, and the importance of naming.
What does Signifyin mean?
Signifyin refers to the various indirect, clever, ironic, and playful ways of giving your opinion about another person - for example, insulting someone, deflating someone's pretentiousness, or paying someone a compliment - without saying explicitly what you mean.
What are the blues to African American culture?
The blues are a matrix - a womb, a network...a point of ceaseless input and output- and as such, they are also a metaphor for African American culture as a whole.
What does economics of slavery mean?
It means that the economic oppression of black Americans is slavery's legacy, and economic oppression is itself a form of bondage.
What do black women negotiate within their cultural identity?
They negotiate the conflicting requirements of their relationship to the black community as a whole - their solidarity with black men against racist oppression- and their relationship to women of all races in an effort to resist sexist oppression.
What are some characteristics of female character types?
The suspended woman, the victim of men and of society as a whole, with few or no options; suspended because she cannot do anything about her situation. The second type is the assimilated woman, who is not victimized by physical violence and has much more control of her life, but who is victimized by psychological violence in that she is cut off from her African American roots by her desire to be accepted by white society. Emergent woman is coming to an awareness of her own psychological and political oppression and becoming capable of creating a new life and new choices for herself, usually through a harsh experience of initiation that makes her ready for the change. Liberated woman who has discovered her abilities, knows what she needs, and goes about getting it. Imagery is very important.
What does an Africanist presence in American history mean?
Africanist is a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. An Africanist presence in reading white mainstream literature is a white misconception of African and African American people on which white authors have projected their own fears, needs, desires, and conflicts.
How should we judge the white literary canon?
Examine the ways in which the major and championed characteristics or our national [white] literature - individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence are coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell- are responses to a dark abiding Africanist presence.