Position Papers for Week #2

The position paper has as its goal to prepare students for lively, informed, thoughtful, substantial class discussion. The goal is not necessarily to write a complete finished essay, but to articulate some thoughts (they can be numbered; they can be bullets; they can be in the form of a letter; they can be exploratory) well enough to contribute to class discussion in a thoughtful way

Monday, Feb. 12, Position paper #1, option 1

Please bring to class a position paper of 2-4 pages, using format as laid out in the syllabus. Please discuss two aspects of Venus (themes and staging) in relation to issues in at least two of the readings on Saarjie Baartman assigned for today, or to Mary Douglas' and Harriet Ngubane's work on pollution, danger, and boundaries. Which ever pair of readings you choose, please also talk a bit about how the two relate to each other (how Yvette Abrahams forms a critique, explicit and implicit, of Bernth Lindfors; or how Harriet Ngubane uses and extends Mary Douglas' ideas but doesn't explicitly acknowledge Douglas' theories).

Here's more explanation:

One aspect of Venus to discuss in relation to the readings will be to focus on a major theme or idea.

Here you might think about themes (but you are not restricted to) such as:

Love, or Body Measurement and Anatomization

or The Connection between Exoticization and Imperialism

or The Connection between Sexual Exploitation, Degradation, and Racism

or Complicity in Knowledge,Voyeurism and Exoticization -- Theatre, Freak Show, and Medical Theatre.

Or The Problematic Relationship between The Venus Hottentot and Saarjie Baartman or Sara Bartman.

A theme is a major topic, stated in a noun phrase, such as "The Interplay of Filth and Desire." An idea is a complete thought, stated in a grammatical sentence, such as "Free Will is a Fiction of Paternalistic Coercion."

A second aspect of Venus to consider in relation to the readings will be to address some element of staging in relation to the body.

Here you can discuss body type in casting; uses of masks, puppets, dolls, gigantic forms, miniatures to explore the body.

Or, the use of bodies in relation to spatial forms or spaces-- circles, orbits, cages, stages, stands.

Or the body in motion: dancing, walking, standing, squatting, sitting.

Or the body in relation to clothing. Or bodies in relationship to one another in violence, touch, display.

Or sexual acts on stage.

Wednesday, Feb. 14, Position Paper #1, option 2

These readings either extend theoretical ideas about Freakery and Exoticization to imperialism, gender, class, and social differences -- or, curiously, do NOT do so.

Bogdan's article gets at the social construction of freakery within the institutions of commercial popular culture in the U.S. through the 19th and 20th centuries. He removes the discussion almost entirely from issues race, class, gender, sexuality, and imperialism, however. Instead, he gets at particular strategies for understanding the processes of selling freakery. What are his goals and methods (notice he is a sociologist and uses no sources published later than 1992 or 1993). How and why does his article direct attention at issues of the "disabled" body in relationship to freakery as a mainly commercial phenomenon? What are the contributions and limits of his article for this course?

Dubinsky and Burke each address the relationships of Eurocentric discourses to cultural bodies (and nature) in Zimbabwe and at Niagara Falls (at the border of NY and Ontario). Both use far more complex theories about race, imperialism, and discourse as a form of power. What are the contributions and limits of these articles for this course?

If you want, alternatively, please discuss how these articles become increasingly theoretical, and how the theories you encounter give you new ways to think about Venus, or museums, or pollution and danger and "dirt," or the Other, tourism, ethnography, or other issues we have encountered.

Friday, Feb. 16, Position Paper #1, option 3

Please take each chapter of Foucault and discuss one central idea of his in each chapter. Any one idea you like. Small or huge. For example, consider how his thesis that of sexuality has a "history" allows us to see the culturally and historically distinctive changes in discourse about the body, historically changing treatments of the body, or how the body is constructed as a historical subject in different periods in Europe. Or, you might discuss how panopticism is related to not only disciplines of punishment, but also to disciplines of education. Or, you might address our notions of converting or reforming the interior disembodied self relate to notions of controlling the body and sexuality?

Also please discuss, for a couple of paragraphs, how the Foucault reading, in particular sections, or, as a whole, gives you any new terms, frameworks, theories, perspectives from which to view Venus or any of the other readings. How do you see Burke's essay, for example, or Dubinsky's, as growing, in part, out of a Foucaultian system of thought?