Defining globalization and reflecting on its relationship to gender

To start class today, I'd like you to reflect on our readings on gender and globalization. In your own words, how would you define globalization? Which writer do you think provides us with the best or most useful explanation of this term? Next, I'd like you to identify one key example from one of the readings that you think illustrates most powerfully the relationship between globalization and gender. Last, post any questions you have here about today's reading.

Final Reflections on Stone Butch Blues

To conclude class today, I’d like you to post one last reflection on this novel to our course blog. Imagine you are writing a letter to Jess Goldberg to tell hir what you’ve gained by reading hir life story. What would you like to tell this character about what you’ve witnessed in the past few weeks? What lessons, insights, or questions will you take away from hir experiences? What perspectives did ze share with you that you found valuable, challenging, difficult, or uplifting? Why do you think you’re responding in the way that you are? Based on your experience as a reader, how might reading this novel change your own life or future actions? To help you get yourself in the right mindset, make sure and start your comment with "Dear Jess," ...

Discussion Questions for Stone Butch Blues

To focus our discussion of the middle sections of Stone Butch Blues, I’d like you to get into small groups (see group assignments below) and discuss the questions I’ve posed below. As you discuss them, please appoint one of your group members to take notes on your conversation, and at the end of the conversation, I’d like you all to work together to draft a short response that you can post to our course blog. (As we did a few weeks ago, I’d like our blog to be a resource for everyone in the class when you turn to writing your upcoming essay.) For all these questions, I would like you to identify at least two passages that help you answer the question or provide a compelling illustration for what you think is going on in the novel.

Here the three main questions, I’d like us to start with today:

• In “Chapter 12,” Jess tells us, “It was 1968” (124). What is the significance of this date? What is happening in the larger world and in Jess’s community? How does this impact her life and her evolving identity?

• Focus your discussion on Theresa as a character. Who is she? What does she represent for Jess? How does she evolve as a character and what are the consequences of her transformation for herself and on Jess?

• Why do so many of the butches in this novel start thinking about taking (and actually taking) hormones and passing as (or becoming) men? What social, political, and economic changes occur that make transitioning appealing or seem like an inevitable option?

Here are the groups I’d like you to work in today:

• Group 1: Sam, Tessa, Samantha & Jessi M.
• Group 2: Jessica, Mackenzie, Montana & Nermina
• Group 3: Ali, Yurika, Helen & Lynsey
• Group 4: Dahisy, Jessie G.G., Kelsey & Lauren
• Group 5: Karolyn, Duncan, Aspen & Varinia
• Group 6: Alyssa, Court, Deidre & Gabe
• Group 7: Shannon, Natalie, Mariam & Chelsea

Once you draft your responses to these questions, post them to our blog (or appoint a group member to post them later today once you have access to the internet).

Initial reflections on Stone Butch Blues

To start class today, I’d like you to take 10-15 minutes and reflect on your initial responses to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. What do you think so far about this novel? How would you describe your intitial reading experience? What seems particularly striking or challenging about it as a text? What’s the most important insight into gender that you think you’ve gained by reading it?

Second, identify the most significant passage or scene that you’ve read and briefly describe it to the rest of class, including a brief quotation (and page number) that captures this moment in the text. Then, explain why you think it is significant.

Midterm Review

To help you prepare for next week’s take-home midterm essay exam, I’d like you to spend the rest of class working in small groups reviewing our course reading thus far. For each of the essays or excerpts that we’ve read, I’d like you to write a paragraph (or so) in which you summarize the main claim or central argument of the piece, briefly describe how the scholar supports or explains his or her argument, and the explain why you think this piece is significant or meaningful.

Each group should pick 4 or 5 of the pieces listed below and complete these summaries before the end of class. Then, before class on Tuesday, I would like you individually to post one or two of your summaries to our course blog as a way to help the rest of class review our readings in preparation for the midterm. Here are the readings we’ve completed thus far:

• Judith Lorber, “The Social Construction of Gender”
• Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex”
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Should There Only Be Two Sexes?”
• Thomas Laqueur, “The Discovery of the Sexes”
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
• David Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?”
• Will Roscoe, “Was We’wha a Homosexual?”
• Paula Gunn Allen, “How the West Was Really Won”
• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual”
• Judith Halberstam, “Perverse Presentism”

After reading Monday’s articles, feel free to include a summary of one of them if you’re feeling ambitious.

• Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women’s Oppression”
• Lillian Faderman, “Acting ‘Woman,’ Thinking ‘Man’”
• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race”

Reflecting on two-spirit peoples, looking ahead to female worlds

Before class on Thursday, I'd like you to reflect on Tuesday's class and what we've learned about American Indian sex/gender systems. How would you define or describe what a two-spirit person is? What's distinct (now and historically) about sex/gender within the context of Native American cultures? How have they informed European and Anglo-American notions of sexuality?

Second, after you complete the reading for Thursday, I'd like you pose a question or two about the reading that you think would generate an interesting discussion for the rest of class. Make sure it's an open-ended question (one that can't be answered with a yes or no) and responds to the reading in engaging ways.

Identifying Laqueur's main claim about sex

Before we discuss today’s readings as entire class, I would like you to take a few minutes to reflect on the first article we read, Thomas Laqueuer’s “The Discovery of the Sexes.” In your own words, what would you say is the most important point that he makes in this article? (For example, you might answer the question “What was discovered about the sexes in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?” Or, “What relationship was forged between cultural understanding between a woman’s ovaries and her sex/gender?”) Then, I’d like you to identify a brief passage that you think represents Laqueur’s main claim. Why do you think this point is so important for understanding the history of sex/gender?