Heteronormativity

with it.” Another mid-20s Brony from Maryland was accused for having a fetish for “pony porn.” Some of these responses closely coincide with the more vitriolic fag identity; however, they demonstrate how masculinity, in terms of maturity and heteronormativity, becomes contentious when the fandom disrupts contemporary understandings of gender norms. Dominant forms of masculinity become ubiquitous through repetitive condemnations on the prospect of failure, resulting in the notion of an…

Foucault discusses this idea of normality stating “the legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm...” (1976, p40) which subsequently, can be used to explain the concept of heteronormativity, an idea developed by Michael Warner (Warner, 1993). It represented the belief that opposite sex relationships were perceived to be the natural sexuality and that anything which defied this idea was viewed as unusual. Rich explores the…

signals that impressiveness; not surprisingly, such characteristic as being impeccable and smartly dressed, dashing appearance, mental and physical quickness, aggressiveness, and vigor reference the default upperclassmen, maleness, whiteness, and heteronormativity of ideal investment bankers” (167). This is the typical mold for an investment banker according to Ho, but many students who do not fit this category are getting in education in investment banking to eventually try to end up on Wall…

Privilege and oppression provides a framework for understanding how institutional structures and ideologies shapes individual experiences. Privilege and oppression also explains “how power operates in society” which led to the formation of “a dominant group and a marginalized group” (Launius and Hassel, Threshold Concepts, 72-73). “Oppression can be defined as prejudice and discrimination directed toward a group and perpetuated by the ideologies and practices of multiple social institutions”…

The Obstacles of Becoming Elite The elite within society are a small group of people who have access to many benefits that those ranked lower than them don’t have access to. This gives those at the top privilege, but this privilege is maintained by the institutions within society. Karen Ho introduces the idea of “smartness”, and how this label defines who is elite within society. She presents it as something that is created in order to maintain this eliteness. Joseph Stiglitz talks about how…

I first stumbled upon the Persona series when I was 16. Persona 4 was on sale at GameStop and I had to get my mom to buy it because I was not old enough. During this point in my life, I was struggling with a multitude of issues including existential crises, fitting in with the world, and most importantly, my sexual identity. After reading the back label for information on the game, I thought it was perfect. A bizarre murder mystery is just what I needed to escape reality. Or so I thought. The…

Institutions, ideologies and individualism all are interconnected concepts which influence one another. Institutions group people together under the same umbrella of ideology. Any institution is merely a system in which each person in it is handed a script and that script is the same for everyone so that the institution could propagate its own ideology. Individualism is a characteristic of a person, a characteristic which is composed of original ideas to solve its’ own problems no matter what…

Intersectionality is characterized as the connections among numerous dimensions of the identities and the modalities of social relations and encounters of prohibition and subordination, including sex, class, race, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality. It begins on the reason that everybody experience different, layered characters. The hypothesis endeavors to uncover the diverse sorts of segregation and impediments that happen as an outcome of the mix of organic, social and social characters.…

Introduction In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Beatriz Preciado uses their body and their body of work as a means of transing theory. Put another way, B.P. uses a genre bending approach to writing theory to attempt to articulate the lived experience of gender ambiguity. B.P. challenges normative conceptions and understandings of bodies, theory, and modes of production in an attempt to explain the queer body. To do so, B.P. employs the radical approach…

I first became familiar with the relationship between feminism and disability when I was assigned reading from the anthology Feminist Disability Studies. With essays from writers such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Alison Kafer, it is an incredibly powerful collection, demonstrating how the interests of feminist theory and disability studies overlap. And yet, despite the efforts of these scholars and disabled feminists in academia and in activist groups, disability does not seem to be on the…