Judith Anderson

In the play Helen by Euripides the main character, Helen often finds herself in complicated situations. To get out of those situations, Helen believes that her only option is to manipulate, deceive, and lie to people. Helen’s main goal is to be reunited with her husband, Menelaos, in her homeland. Helen persuades characters to do things her way by manipulation, lies, and deception. Throughout Helen, the main character manipulates Teucros, Menelaos, and Theoclymenos using deception, persuasion, and deceit which derive from her use of rhetoric. Helen manipulates these men to achieve her end goal of being reunited with her husband Menelaos. Helen’s manipulation begins when she meets Teucros, a Greek that has a burning hatred for Helen because of her role in the war. However, when the two meet, Teucros doesn’t realize that the person he is talking to is Helen, he just recognizes that she is similar to his foe. Helen recognizes that in front of her is this man who hates her and takes advantage of that. Helen deceives Teucros by pretending to be an outsider that has no knowledge of the war, allowing him to open himself up. Helen manipulates Teucros by her use of rhetoric. At the very beginning of Helen and Teucros’ dialogue, Helen switches the focus from her to Teucros. Helen asks Teucros, “Whoever you are, you wretch, why do you turn from me and hate me for that woman’s misfortunes?” (78). Instead of asking Teucros why Helen is so bad, she asks him about why he believes that…

Feminist theory is a fairly new approach to the IR discipline and the aim is to produce knowledge that helps inform practices to improve the lives of women. Feminists use the experience of women to make research that is beneficial to women. In doing so they believe that their viewpoints might uncover aspects of reality that is hidden by more conventional approaches. Feminists believe that by paying attention to experiences of women IR theories might be reformulated and the understanding of world…

many varying faces and personalities’ rushes through your head? Audre Lorde and Judith Butler are two such writers that share a connection through their craft and their meaning. Though they may have these general similarities, they have their own approaches to specific problems and issues. In society, people are thrust into categories previously developed to further relate one to another. For both of these theorists, the groupings that individuals are thrown into are lacking to say mildly.…

When I registered for the course, I was in the process of signing up for classes I had to take. I didn’t have a choice in most of them, so I didn’t do much research into what each lesson plan held. However, during our first day, I was pleasantly surprised by the goal of the class – learning about literary criticism and, more importantly, the theories that went along with it. I felt confident because I already had experience in these fields, and this class would just throw me into the deep end of…

The question of whether the relationship between Feminism and Postmodernism is or has been a productive one (especially for the former) is one that has been asked for a generation now. In its wake has emerged philosophies and theories which have profoundly challenged, if not altered, the shape and direction of Feminism, much to the ongoing dismay of many of its advocates. While the often-contentious discourse around these “two leading currents of our time” (17) did not begin with the debate that…

Expectations and standards for women in society are unrealistic and outrageous. These thoughts of what a woman should be like and how they should behave have been around for centuries. Woman are often times looked down upon when they don’t look like how society tells them to and this can cause a number of things to go wrong in their self image and life. Unfortunately these high expectations have had an extremely negative impact on females. In Margie Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” she discusses the…

The 1965 Barbie advertisement supports Judith Butler’s theory in Gender Trouble of gender performativity. In the performativity of women, certain actions associated with femininity have been repeated to form a concrete idea of what a true woman is. Butler supports this idea with the statement that the “expectation produces the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (Butler xv), meaning that the constant pressure for women of all ages to be feminine, demure, and motherly creates the idea that there…

Gender inequality is an issue that has been happening for thousands of years, affecting cultures from all around the world. Women have endured since ancient times the title as the inferior being, the “other” gender besides the man, the weaker and less valuable specimen. This gender inequality created a huge difference between men and women, placing women’s rights under men’s jurisdiction, which dictated what women were and were not allowed to do. This issue was analyzed by the French and…

Beginning in the 1990’s, a new movement emerged alongside postmodernism known as Third Wave Feminism. After fighting for legal and social equality by standing up against patriarchal oppression, the goals of feminists broadened to break down concepts of gender, sexuality, and the body (Rampton). Queer Theorists such as Judith Butler branched from this new movement in Women’s Studies to examine the reality of identity and attack the problematic perception of heteronormativity, the belief that…

This, however, does not excuse man’s blatant disregard for the woman’s humanity and perceived inferiority. Judith Butler argues that sex is a matter of interpretation and contrary to Beauvoir, it is not natural. Perhaps the most or one of the most famous quotes in Beauvoir’s the Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” further dives into the stance that femininity is not biological, psychological or intellectual. One becomes a woman from social and cultural constructs, learned…