Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter presents a critique of the American gender structure, as well as the feminist response to it. She focuses largely on the use of language, which is the subject of research by many sociological scholars. The words that we use are attached to social meaning, based on culture …
Fifty Shades of Foucault
Foucault’s theory that freedom can be unlocked and accessed when sexuality is no longer repressed is seen as being radical, but I don’t know how far-fetched it actually is. We can see I it in society today with the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Gray series—both the books and now the movies. When the …
Paid Housewives and Betty Draper
Federici’s piece on house work immediately made me think about Betty Draper from Mad Men. Set in the 1960’s, Betty was a housewife, with a husband who worked an important and high paying job in Manhattan. She had hired help, as well, to aid in caring for her children. Still, she was at her husband’s …
You’re Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile :)
Silvia Federici expresses radical views of feminism in her late 1970s piece "Wages Against Housework" in that she purports that housework is unpaid labor that is carefully constructed in capitalism to serve both capitalism itself and ultimately patriarchy. Federici outlines how work is valued in capitalism based on the wages awarded for that work. Depending …
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Capitalism and Sexuality
In Foucault's "The History of Sexuality," the focus is placed upon the oppression of people and more specifically of sexuality over the course of Western history. Foucault draws an interesting conclusion about how the shift from open conversation about sex and sexuality became so silenced- he cites the rise of capitalism in the 17th century …
Let’s (not) talk about sex…
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality taught me a lot about this subject. I did not know that public expressions of sexuality were more common in the seventeenth century than they were in the nineteenth century, I thought that sexuality followed a sort of linear path from “not acceptable at all” to today, which I would …
How far does “the man’s” hand stretch?
Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon is very interesting to me, through the lens of the prison itself and what it means for society outside of that institution. The idea is that in a panopticon, prisoners cannot see anyone else but they can always be seen, and they do not know when they are being seen …
