Reading Assignment Template Class 2 CGS 105 Summer 2019 – Due 1100am Tuesday July 9 (upload the completed template as a pdf to web site, or if you can't get that to work, e-mail the completed template to the instructors)

Instructions (Please read this section carefully!):
– Please consult the reading strategies discussed in class on and on the reading strategy handout.
– Use the 'reductionist' strategy for the selections from Foucault and Butler. The paragraphs from those two selections are numbered below, with the first several words of each of those paragraphs reproduced. In the space below each number, fill in a very brief summary of the main point or points of the paragraph (you can do this with a phrase, a sentence or for some especially critical paragraphs, a few sentences).
– Use the 'framework' strategy for the selection from Muñoz. Pick a perspective that you will use to read the text (such as a feminist perspective, a sociology perspective, an economics perspective, or the perspective of your own personal experiences) and record the places in the text that resonate with or against that perspective. And then briefly summarize the text from that perspective.
– Please answer one or two general questions about each reading selection very briefly at the end of this template.
– This is the most difficult reading assignment of CGS 105. These texts are challenging, especially Butler's article. If you find that you can't understand a paragraph, skip it and come back to it – further reading might clarify the meaning of that paragraph. You will probably encounter this situation a number of times in Butler's article, even with the first paragraph! Especially with Butler's article, you might consider trying Rachel's strategy of skimming the article first and then attempting a closer reading of the text.
– Don't be overwhelmed! You don't have to understand everything on your first reading of these texts! Do your best, and we will fill in the gaps in our discussions in class. These texts are packed with meaning and information, and pulling that out is a long-term project. This assignment is the first step along that journey.
– Your instructors are here to support you and help you. If you have questions, e-mail us and come to the office hours on Friday July 5 1-3pm at Mandeville cafe lounge (we could be outside at the cafe or inside in the lounge) and Monday, July 8 1-3pm at Mandeville (we might announce a change in location by e-mail).

Foucault History of Sexuality Volume 1, Part 4 p 92-131
Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume 1 covers three main points (in bt's reading of the text). The first point is discussed in sections One to Three. Foucault says that the Repressive Hypothesis is problematic. The Repressive Hypothesis states that, starting in the seventeenth century in European society, there was a period of Victorian-style repression of sexuality, followed by a period of relaxation and liberation in the mid to late twentieth century. Foucault instead says that this supposed repressive period was one where discourse around sexuality expanded exponentially, starting with confessional style discourses and moving on to bureaucratic and scientific studies that created the concept of sexuality, the normative category of 'heterosexual,' and multiplying 'deviant' sexualities, including 'homosexual.'

The second point concerns how these discourses regulate sexuality – that is covered in section Four, in your reading selection that you will summarize below

The third point concerns how these regulatory discourses serve political and economic interests of societies/nation states, emphasizing the reproductive functions of the regulation and control of sexuality, what Foucault calls biopower/biopolitics.

Foucault Section Four Chapter 2 p 92-102
1. Hence the objective is to analyze

2. Should we turn the expression around,

3. Continuing this line of discussion,

4. It is in this sphere of force relations

5. To return to sex and the discourses of truth

6. Which leads us to advance, in a preliminary way

7. One must not suppose that there exists a

8. We must not look for who has the power

9. No "local center," no "pattern of transformation"

10. What is said about sex must not be analyzed

11. In short, it is a question oforienting ourselves

Foucault Chapter 3 p 103-114
12. Sexuality must not be described as a

13. There is no single, all-encompassing strategy,

14. In a first approach to the problem, it

15. A hysterization of women 's bodies: a threefold

16. 2. A pedagogization of children 's sex: a double

17. 3. A socialization of procreative behavior: an

18. 4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure: the

19. Four figures emerged from this preoccupation

20. What was at issue in these strategies? A

21. It will be granted no doubt that relations of sex

22. It is not exact to say that the deployment

23. This interpenetration of the deployment of

24. What has taken place since the seventeenth century

25. But this development was not without its tensions

26. This was the context in which psychoanalysis

27. Hence the domain we must analyze in the

28. The first phase corresponded to the need to

29. If the politics of sex makes little use of the law

Foucault Chapter 4 p 114-131
30. The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures

31. We must attempt to trace the chronology of

32. 1 . The chronology of the techniques themselves

33. It was during the same period-the end of the 

34. This mutation took place at the turn of the

35. Innovations that merged together quite well,

36. And the strange position of psychiatry at the end

37. It is clear that the genealogy of all these techniques,

38. 2. But the foregoing is still only a dating of the

39. The same can be said of the family as an agency

40. For their part, the working classes managed

41. These chronological reminders-whether

42. Sex is not that part of the body which the bourgeoisie

43. There were doubtless many reasons for

44. May I be forgiven by those for whom the

45. Some think they can denounce two symmetrical

46. A few more words are in order. As we

47. Psychoanalysis comes in at this juncture: both

48. The history of the deployment of sexuality

49. This same development, moreover, opened

Butler Performative Acts and Gender Constitution p 900-911
Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, is one of the foundational texts in queer theory. This article, first published in 1988, is a summary of some of the ideas presented in Gender Trouble. Butler's dense texts are legendary – everyone who has read them has struggled as you are...

50. Philosophers rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense,

51. When Simone de Beauvoir claims, "one is not born, but, rather

52. Through the conception of gender acts sketched above, I will try t

53. Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanation

54. In both contexts, the existence and facticity of the material or

55. Merleau-Ponty maintains not only that the body is an historical

56. It is, however, clearly unfortunate grammar to claim that there is

57. To do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem to be some of the

58. When Beauvoir claims that "woman" is a historical idea and not

59. How useful is a phenomenological point of departure for a feminist

60. The feminist appropriation of the phenomenological theory

61. When Beauvoir claims that woman is an "historical situation," she

62. To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements

63. Can phenomenology assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented

64. But the theatrical sense of an "act" forces a revision of the individualis

65. In what senses, then, is gender an act? As anthropologist Victor

66. As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical

67. Although the links between a theatrical and a social role

68.Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that i 

69. As a consequence, gender cannot be understood as a role whi

70. This view of gender does not pose as a comprehensive theory about

71. But it is one thing to use the term and know its ontological

72. Clearly, though, I envision the critical genealogy of gender to

73. Certainly, it remains politically important to represent women

José Esteban Muñoz Disidentifications p 1-19
Muñoz is one of a number of outstanding scholars and activists who challenged and queered the cis/white/male/middle class orientation of much of early queer theory and queer culture. This selection addresses the limits of this narrowness for understanding the formation of identity.

Perspective(s)/Framework(s) with which you will be reading Muñoz:

Resonances with/against this perspective/framework within the selection. How would you summarize your reading of this selection from this perspective/framework?

GENERAL QUESTIONS
(A) Briefly summarize what Foucault means when they use the word 'power' and how that power operates to regulate sexual behaviors and identities.

(B) Describe an example of how Foucault's 'power' has influenced the identity of a specific person. You can use the example of a person you know, a person you have heard of, or a plausible person and a scenario that you invent.

(C) Butler argues that gender is constructed from repeated performative acts. Describe your interpretation of how this process determines gender. In your interpretation, is Butler arguing that the gender identities of all people are fluid or potentially fluid? [by fluid, we mean flowing/changing through time]

(D) Summarize what Muñoz means by 'disidentification.' In what ways is Muñoz's disidentification compatible with or incompatible with Foucault conception of identities and Butler's conception of identities?