How have prevalent societal and cultural norms about gender and sexuality affected your own life
How have prevalent societal and cultural norms about gender and sexuality affected your own life? Think critically about how expectations about gender roles, sexual identity and/or orientation are manifested and navigated in the contexts most familiar to you. Are you expected to perform a certain gender identity? How are you expected to perform it? And how do you choose to perform it?
• Draw upon childhood, family life, time spent in educational institutions (including the college campus), and other places, contexts, and interactions where you have spent a significant amount of time.
• Explore how various forms of privilege and/or discrimination might have shaped these experiences.
• If you consider yourself a feminist, explore what aspects of “everyday” feminism as discussed the first day of class resonate with you. If you don’t necessarily identify with that label, that is totally fine. Just explain your thoughts or curiosity about the term. Maybe this course is your starting point, or maybe these are questions you have already been thinking about. If you are not comfortable with the label “feminist,” feel free to explain that.
Conceptual Tips
• You can (though you don’t have to) use this interview as a model, but think of this piece as more of an interview with yourself:
https://feministfrequency.com/
• You can use Chimamanda Adiche’s TED Talk (the first one, about feminism) to help you think about how to approach your paper. What kinds of incidents and experiences does she bring up? What resonated with you, and how? Perhaps there is some overlap? Perhaps you had the opposite experience?
• One approach could be to think about the discussions you had during the brief in-class group discussion on “being a killjoy.” What sort of situations from your own life came up for you during this conversation?
Writing Tips
• Try to write clearly and concisely. This is an exploration of your thoughts, but the aim is to learn to organize them into a narrative. You could organize them thematically, chronologically, by location, etc.
• Some good writing strategies to follow: Jot down your thoughts, randomly, as they come to you. When you are ready to write the paper, read them over a few times. Identify patterns, flows, transitions, and contrasts. Use these organizing ideas to write an outline. Fill out the outline with elaborations and examples. Try to follow the rule of one big idea per paragraph. The first sentence of each paragraph should introduce this main idea. Try to make sure your paragraphs smoothly transition into each other, and are not randomly arranged. The best way to write a strong introduction and conclusion is to draft them after you have written the rest of the paper. Your conclusion should provide a brief summary of your key points. These, plus citing your sources (see below), are the qualities of an “A” paper.
How to use the course material in your paper:
• Please refer to ideas discussed at least two of the pieces we read or viewed on the first or second day of class. It’s fine to cite videos or the podcast too.
• Remember to cite any sources you use, both in textand at the end of the paper. For this first assignment, don’t worry if you aren’t sure how to create a proper bibliography etc. You won’t lose points for your style of citation this early in the quarter, but you will lose points for failing to cite the sources at all.
Solution preview for the order on how have prevalent societal and cultural norms about gender and sexuality affected your own life
APA
632 words