Authors & Works

Question 1

The Feminine Mystique

Answer 1

Betty Friedan

• challenges the whole concept of “true womanhood”
• the problem that has no name

Question 2

“The Cult of True Womanhood”

Answer 2

Barbara Welter

• uses ladies’ journals/magazines
• (Alice Walker’s turn to the idea of gardens)

Question 3

“Gender as Structure of Social Practice”

Answer 3

R.W. Connell

• 3 fold structure of gender-Power relations, production relations, cathexis
• gay men and other categories marginalized masculinity
• the patriarchal dividend

Question 4

Gender Trouble

Answer 4

Judith Butler
* Feminists claim to represent women
* gender and sex socially constructed
* Neitzche and gender identity (dancer and the dance)
identity vs. the deed

Question 5

“Melodramas of Beset Manhood”

Answer 5

Nina Baym

• American literary canon
• the mechanisms that excluded women writers from that canon
• early Amer critics- “most American” work rather than “best” work
• became editor of Norton Anthology to solve the problem she identified

Question 6

“How to Look at Television”

Answer 6

Theodor Adorno

• of the Frankfurt school
• mass culture makes us mindless
• conventional values conveyed- what’s on TV is conventional- it has to be to appeal to greatest # of people to draw biggest # of advertisees

Question 7

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

Answer 7

Louis Althusser

• subject: Big S little s- interpellation to an ideology
• ideology: system of pracatice put into place by subjects
• (Richard Serra- “Televsion Delivers People”) commercials for the commercials

Question 8

“The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies”

Answer 8

Michael Denning

• American Studies serves as a substitute for a developed Marxist culture
• American Exceptionalism- term coined by Joseph Stalin
• A.S. founding ?- What is American?
• What is culture? allowed more engagement w/marxism

Question 9

Racial Formation in the United States

Answer 9

Michael Omi and Howard Winant

• race as historically and socially constructed
• the state as always racially oriented
• the state and social movements

Question 10

“Toward an Operational Definition of the Mexican American”

Answer 10

Fernando Penalosa

• range of variation- Americans of Mex ancestry, Mex-Am, Chicanos
• 4 contributors to Mex-Am culture: “traditional” Mex culture, Majority Am culture, class, minority status

Question 11

“The Race for Theory”

Answer 11

Barbara Christian

• assessment of marxist critics
• assessment of 2nd wave feminism
• theorizing through hieroglyphs