Assignment Update
3/30/04

Daily response/question alternatives:

As you may remember, the syllabus indicates that you must write a response or question to readings for each time that we meet. Becuase I have nothing to encourage you to do this, I am providing you with the following alternatives:

1) If you have been doing the responses as I initially assigned them, continue to write them and turn them in on Thursday 4/15.

2) If you would prefer an alternative assignment, you may lead a 15-20 minute discussion of one of the essays that we are reading in the next two weeks. I will assign one of the essays to you. You should: 1) note what you see as a couple of major themes; 2) connect these themes briefly to one or two other readings from the semester; and 3) ask a couple of questions that will provoke some discussion.

Gender Construction Essay:

During the first week of class, you wrote an essay which you will now either rewrite or write a commentary about. Your assignment is to use materials from the class in order to complicate what you said at that time about your own gender construction and gender identity. The original essays are, as a group, nice reflections, ones that largely connect your sense of selves to relationships, generally with parents, siblings, and peers or to cultural forces, such as the media and sports. You might use readings to suggest the ways by which family relationships are embedded the family as an institutional structure or how race and class dynamics work with social institutions to provide you with particular opportunities/constraints. You might discuss how social privilege/lack of privilege works with these relationships. You might discuss contradictions in your sense of identity and connect this to historical change. You might simply go back and add to your essay because some of the readings have rpompted you to consider things that you didn't think about when you wrote the first essay. In terms of format, you could either go back and integrate such theses into your original paper, you could use footnotes or columns to write commentary on your original essay, or you might create a webapge that uses links/anchors to connect parts of your original paper to commentary. I don't care which format you use, but be sure that your paper takes tour original thoughts (which were already pretty interesting and suggestive of why you are interested in gender studies) and makes them more embedded in analysis. One final note: Be sure that you use the course materials to analyze your identity. That is, don't use the readings to make note of issues that you don't face. For example, if you identify as heterosexual, you might talk about how homophobia affects you even as a heterosexual person, or how you see heterosexual privilege working in your life compared to gay/lesbian/queer friends, but don't talk about not having to confront homophobia because you are heterosexual.

Your complete essay should be 6- 8typed, double-spaced pages. If you do it as a webpage, just email it to me; otherwise print it and bring it to class to turn in on 4/13.