Pick one: (Answer only 1 question for 1500-word case study essay)
1) In what ways does Willa Cather’s (1905) short story Paul’s Case bear out Foucault’s (1978) argument in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1? Illustrate with reference to the text.
2) Normative sexual and gender identities depend for their coherence and stability on the repudiation of a marked, abject other – a devalued category which forms the ‘constitutive outside’ of the normative identity. Illustrate with reference to everyday discourses that surround a sexual or gender identity of your choice.
3) Richard Dyer discusses how popular cultural representations ‘perform heterosexuality … in such remorseless, crazed and alarmed modes that they suggest heterosexuality is indeed on a hiding to nothing in its assertion of its own naturalness and normality’ (1997, p. 272). Discuss, with reference to the context of Dyer’s argument and a cultural representation of your choice (taken from film, TV, popular media, fiction, etc.).
4) In a 1981 interview, Foucault remarked, ‘the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process’. How does the problematization of (homo)sexuality limit the possibilities of friendship? Illustrate with reference to examples of your choice.
