Essentialism

The concept of gender is central the construction of the body and sexuality in contemporary cultural studies. Gender is a complex matter, as modern representations of what it means to be a gendered and sexed body is internalized and acted upon differently depending on one’s culture and upbringing. Across cultures, gender and identity are intimately tied as something that should be viewed as an expression of ones individuality. However, this is rarely the case. Through the use of sociological…

Equality in every shape and size When the feminist movement began to arise in society in the 1970’s it, almost simultaneously, created a different ramification of feminism as well. This ramification of feminism, called Essentialism, manifested itself in, for example, the belief that women were not only supposed to be equal to their male counterparts, but that women were the better sex and superior to men. Therefore, essential feminists believed that women should live up to that potential and…

Teaching has always been my calling. Ever since my first week of kindergarten, I knew that teaching would be my chosen path. There is something about the feeling of standing in front of a classroom and educating those who would later lead the way in the future that satisfies me. In this paper, I will discuss what I have learned about the community and culture of my host school and how that has shaped my beginning identity as a teacher by referring to my reflective first field experience…

Queer theory has been largely developed by three women: Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick. Each author argues different viewpoints about a person’s gender, identity and sexuality. Their arguments explore the social and political frameworks through which society interprets sexuality and gender. Since the three arguments regard sexuality in society and politics, could their arguments be compatible with the Althusserian Marxist concepts, especially Marxist definition of ideology? Each of…

In her essay “Feel Good Reel Food: A Taste of the Cultural Kedgeree in Gurinder Chadha’s What’s Cooking?”, Debnita Chakravarti claims that “food is employed as an eloquent indicator for attitudes and constituents of characters, a perfect conveyor of subtexts that often lie too deep for the spoken word” (18). The novel Digging to America by Anne Tyler models this concept by using food to help construct the identities and behaviours of its characters, revealing the complex tensions that exist in…

Rahilly ‘Gender Truth Regime’ Rahilly (2015) adapts Foucalt’s concept of a ‘truth regime’ to explain the ideological prevalence of the gender binary in modern western society. She argues that at an individual, interactional, structural and ideological level, the notion of sex and gender being intertwined has a pervasive effect. Weaving this with West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of ‘doing gender,’ she likens parents’ resistance to the gender binary to Bernstein and De la Cruz’s (2009)…

An analysis of orientalism in ‘Madame Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot Due to the integration of various forms of artistic expression and multicultural customs, opera has been loved by the majority of the people since it was published. Therefore, the same as the other art works and masterpieces, opera also would be influenced by politics and economics, even by the thoughts or minds from most people. Madame Butterfly (Puccini, 1904) and Turandot (Puccini, 1926) were two examples to illustrate how a…

Staurt Hall was Inspired by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1958, 1970), Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the birth of British cultural studies is generally associated with the 1964 founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham by Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Over the next two decades, as education in England faced severe economic hardship, cultural studies…

The film Gattaca, (1997) directed by Andrew Niccol acts as a response to the potential social and identity issues a possible dystopian future could present due to genetic development. Gattaca’s political system utilizes the ideology of genoism to divide society into classes through emphasizing the nurture side of the nature versus nurture, consequently maintaining social control. Genetic determinism can be utilized to objectify humans into human resources, manipulating what one’s identity is as…

For a behaviorist, “efficiency, economy, precision, and objectivity are central value consideration in education” (Knight, 2006). It would be hard to argue that such approaches would not yield results. However, there is also the principles of essentialism that “school’s first task is to teach basic knowledge, champions hard work and discipline, and the teacher’s role is that of an authority figure” (Knight, 2006), such principles seems to coincide with my beliefs as well. As I grow and develop…