Hwang M. Butterfly

TITLE

QUIZ

• How do you write the title of a full-length book (such as a novel, play, etc.)?

• How do you write the title of an article, book chapter, or short story?

• How do you do parenthetical citations in MLA format correctly?

Part 2: Mini-Research Paper (Due November 22)

The second part of this assignment requires you to:

a) make an argument about either Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or M. Butterfly and...

b) integrate your peer-reviewed source in order to enrich and strengthen your own claims.

TITLE

Making an argument

1. Have a thesis! Your argument should offer a reading of your chosen literary text with which someone could disagree. Know the difference between an observation and an analysis/argument.

2. Your argument is therefore grounded in a claim about your chosen literary text rather than a broader claim about the world in general.

TITLE

TITLE

Observation: There are very few graphic descriptions of sexual violence in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Analysis: There are very few graphic descriptions of sexual violence in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. By withholding such descriptions, Jacobs refuses to re-victimize black women for the white gaze.

Argument: Your argument should take the claim from your analysis and develop a thesis that answers the "so what?" question -> why does it matter that Jacobs does this? What are the broader implications of this textual strategy? What does it suggest about Jacobs' agency or assertion of her agency?

Next Week:

* How to incorporate your secondary source!

* How to do an MLA Works Cited page!

This weekend:

* Decide which text you would like to write your esssay on and which secondary source you will summarize

* Begin thinking towards the argument you would like to make about your selected literary text -> read your source with your own analysis in mind.

TITLE

Judith Butler

Gender performativity also depends upon compulsory heterosexuality

TITLE

TITLE

"Is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace" (310).

TITLE

Racist constructions of Asian sexuality

Asian women as submissive, as Butterflies

Asian men as feminized and "unsexy" or sexless

*The sexism that constructs Asian women as "butterflies" also constructs them as heterosexual / desiring to please a man

* The construction of Asian men as feminized also constructs their sexuality as non-existent

TITLE

Why does Butterfly need to be performed over and over again? How does it produce and sediment, through repetition, particular narratives of gender, sexuality, and racial difference?

How does Hwang's repetition introduce a difference and a potential subversion?

TITLE

In groups:

What did you find most interesting about the play upon reading it? Did you like it? Dislike it? Why?

How does Hwang's play engage with and subvert the butterfly fantasy central to Madame Butterfly / Miss Saigon (that is, the fetishized fantasy of Asian women as submissive)?

TITLE

"As a young person, I suffered for a long time, and I suspect many people have, from being told, explicitly or implicitly, that what I 'am' is a copy, an imitation, a derivative example, a shadow of the real. Compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real implies that 'being' lesbian is always a kind of miming. And yet... drag is not an imitation or a copy of some prior and true gender... drag enacts the very structure of impersonation by which any gender is assumed" (312).

"Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original" (313).

TITLE

TITLE

TITLE

In groups:

Read through scenes 6 and 10. How do Gallimard and Song's gender roles and identities shift between these scenes?

Is Song's performance of an orientalist stereotype subversive? If so, how? and if not, why not?

TITLE

At the beginning of the play, we learn Gallimard is in a prison and at the end he dies by suicide. How do you interpret his imprisonment and suicide? How might these relate to the play's broader themes of race, gender, and sexuality?

TITLE

TITLE