In “Definition of Terms,” author Lucia Perillo analyzes the various terms in which her condition (multiple sclerosis) is known as and how their meanings vary. According to Perillo, society has identified the beauty within people like herself and fear they won’t match up. Because of this, slurs such as cripple, disabled, or handicapped are used in order to mask this treasure within an individual (Perillo 16). As Perillo suggests, a speaker using slurs forces themselves into a toxic state of mind (Perillo 6). Perillo presents this claim as a comparison with stories, providing strong imagery.…
The Mississippi Improvement Committee is a rather abstruse name for a group advocating women’s rights and rights for all races. The name, and the people behind this group casts a positive light. What McGuire best shows is how this group has been neglected by history and how it has been “left in the footnotes of history.” McGuire states, “Georgia Gilmore and her club (MIA) from Nowhere, “represented more than the actual cash they contributed each week,” B.J. Simms insisted.…
In the article, “In Defense of Gender”, by Cyra McFadden, the main point is the issue of “neutering of the English Language on the progressive West Coast.” She is essentially bringing up that even the present method for endeavoring to expel sexual inclination from the way that individuals talk and compose has its issue's and that another route should be found. It is essentially about how the English Language is being butchered with a specific end goal to make composing and talking less predisposition, by expelling nonexclusive manly terms from the dialect. These days of political accuracy, individuals, when all is said and done, are losing their character. In spite of the fact that most employments are non-sexual orientation particular, there…
Anna Goldsworthy’s essay. Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny is, overall, an insightful and elegant yet confused discussion of those mentioned in the title. The title, Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and misogyny draws an immediate reaction from the reader. The crude wording is a bold move, and we are automatically invited to assume that Goldsworthy will be able to justify her argument from the title alone.…
In this essay, I argue why Beauvoir’s introduction to the novel The Second Sex and Baldwin’s letter, “My Dungeon Shook,” start in a similar vein. Beauvoir and Baldwin both experience antagonism within themselves, in dealing with the study of women (Beauvoir) and the study of black men (Baldwin) because ‘woman’ and ‘black man’ are conceptualisms that have been authored by white men, in relation to white men, interpellated upon women and black men by white men for ages. These similar introductions into the studies of women and black men parallel the similarity with which both writers attack the misconstrued justifications – science and religion – white men use to construct identities for women and black men as the other, in the duality of the…
Deliver Us from the Labyrinth of Madness: Character Affect in Djuna Barnes 's Nightwood Language is a labyrinth we are born into lost. Only by leaving breadcrumbs, threading our subject, does one remember whence s/he came, where his/her subject ends and begins. Language may offer a solution to reduce problems into simplicity, but for such problems it conceals in language the people suffering within it. The alcoholic, the prostitute, the shameful, are made into monstrous forms by the epithets defining their subject: where language presumes they have no shame, immoral epithets drown those in pity for a subject "incapable" of change.…
Marjorie Garbor, the author of Vested Interests, argues that a cross-dresser enacts neither the man nor the woman, but a “mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. [The third sex] puts into question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (11). The third sex as explained by Garbor is crucial in understanding the work of Claude Cahun who identifies as neither a man or woman who explores all categories used by the majority who work on formulating an identity, including race and sexuality. As proposed by Gabor, cross-dressers as a third sex challenge the socio-historical gender concepts that Butler mentioned as found in culture and reappropriate by each individual. Yet, if looking back at the definition of the third sex as a separate entity…
In today’s world, it seems that one can see many examples of misogyny, violence, and sexism anywhere she goes. Masculinity was once something that people did not pay much mind to, but it has now become something extremely fragile. To question a man’s masculinity is probably his worst nightmare. Nowadays, that sense of manliness unfortunately causes men to put women or other men down. Works such as Jean Kilbourne’s “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt’:…
The turbulent history of Hispaniola and the constant change of control on the island are two of the main reasons for this bad relationship between the countries. From 1822 to 1844 Haiti had complete control of the entire island. Trujillo used this twenty year period as a point of reference to blame Dominican problems on the Haitians. He often said that before the Haitian control of the Dominican Republic, the Dominicans were blond hair and blue eyed.…
This approach to literature is controversial, in that some scholars say that the feminist criticism does not exist. Another critique is the lack of “a rigidly defined methodology” in feminist criticism. Some critics claim that the study of sex roles and stereotypes “can become a shallow survey of existing types and no more than that” (Schweickart). While there are no specific rules, there are some common ideals in feminist criticism. Patriarchy has different connotations for both genders.…
In “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” the author Ariel Levy writes on her point of view as to how she feels about women who abide by raunch culture. Levy believes women have to identify with several different gender stereotypes in order to participate in raunch culture. Gender stereotypes refer to simplistic generalizations of gender attributes and roles of individuals or groups. They may also be positive or negative but hardly disclose accurate information of others and reflect judgement. In addition, she categorizes the two different types of women which she considers participate in raunch culture, as one being the female chauvinist pig and the other being the “girly-girl” in order to support her arguments.…
Most English speaking individuals learn quickly that the language is one that allows for different interpretations of words, different applications of words, and different definitions for the same word. If English isn’t one’s native language, some words can be quite confusing unless you’ve been immersed in the language for a while. In the novel, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, author Mary Pearson uses definitions of a few specific words to show the struggle the main character, Jenna Fox, has applying the true denotation of words to the connotations of the same words and provides the reader with an interesting insight as to how English words can be easily misunderstood. Jenna Fox is a teenage girl struggling to remember her past and although she…
The article “Dude” that I was asked to present to the class was written by Scott Fabius Kiesling, an American sociolinguist, whose interest in the field of language and gender prompted him to investigate the functions and meanings of the word ‘dude’ in American cultural discourses. The first thing I discussed in my presentation was the goals that Scott Kiesling pursued in his paper, namely find out “the patterns of use for dude, its functions and meaning in interactions”, the reasons of its rise in use in 1980s and “how language is socially meaningful”. Then I briefly stated the methodological framework, including various data sources, which Kiesling utilisied in his research. Both were discussed in detail during the whole presentation.…
From the moment she was born, Lula Ann was denied intimacy with her mother due to her color. “I told her to call me ‘Sweetness’ instead of ‘mother’ or ‘Mama.’ It was safer. Being that black and having what I thought were too-thick lips calling me ‘Mama’ would confuse people” (Morrison, 6). Lula Ann was denied even referring to her mother as such due to her color.…
There are few scholars that studying the major variety of taboo words and one of them is Chunming Gao. In his article entitled: A Sociolinguistic Study of English Taboo Language, he stated that the taboo language is made up from the taboo subjects that include, body functions about sex and excretion, private parts of the body, illness and death; words believed to be blasphemy; income, salary, age of ladies, etc. He then focus his study on the major types of the taboo languages that are bodily excretions, death and disease, sex, four-letter words, privacy and discriminatory language and he also provided the examples for each type of taboo language. Bodily excretion, except tears are considered inappropriate to be mentioned publically and Gao…