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An Essay On Body Image
Essay on body image
Sexuality in literature
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While I was reading Homage to My Hips written by Lucille Clifton and Story of My Body written by Judith Ortiz Cofer I came up with many of the same themes and ideas that these stories had in common with each other. One broad idea that I found in both poems was that both of the authors, who are women, wrote about their physical appearance. This could tie into a sexual orientation idea. These poems both describe how the authors think of themselves positively and negatively in a physical way.
When reading “A better life, creating the American dream” by Kate Ellis and Ellen Guettler, and listening to the podcast, we can find out that it describes how the American dream’s meaning has changed over the time. Every person and every generation give a different meaning to it, and these dreams serve as motivation for people to work hard and still believing than better times will come. For the pilgrims the American dream was freedom, nowadays in our generation, the term has changed, and for many of us, it means owning a home and the possession of material things. But, as time pass, the American dream is becoming harder to achieve. The reality for me, is that the most part of Americans are not achieving this desirable dream, and are being
also be seen as a man who enjoyed killing but must come up with an
This line implies that there is only one thing on his mind and that is
In Deborah E. McDowell’s essay Black Female Sexuality in Passing, she writes about the sexual repression of women seen in Nella Larsen‘s writings during the Harlem Renaissance, where black women had difficulty expressing their sexuality. In her essay, she writes about topics affecting the sexuality of women such as, religion, marriage, and male dominated societies. In Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif” there are examples of women who struggle to express their sexuality. The people in society judge women based off their appearance, and society holds back women from expressing themselves due to society wanting them to dress/act a certain way. Religion is one point McDowell brings forth in her essay, during the Jazz era she stated that singers such as Bessie Smith, Gertrude Rainey, and Victoria Spivey sung about sexual feelings in their songs.
Bordo, Susan. "Beauty (Re)discovers the male body." Bordo, Susan. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ninth Edition. Bedford/St.Martin's, 2011. 189-233.
In the Victorian Age, society commonly saw a woman’s sexuality as an incredibly taboo thing to discuss, let alone write and publish a whole poem about. The majority of the Victorian society not only advocated the idea that “respectable women were not supposed to enjoy sex or seek it,” but also adamantly denied the fact that women were able to take on any of the roles of men (Goblin 103). However, despite what the majority of society asserted, this era was also the point at which progressive authors started to use their writings to contradict these norms (Goblin 103). Christina Rossetti avidly broke these social standards by taking components of the Pre-Raphaelite styles of this time and applying them to the female characters in her work (Goblin
Written in 1904, Lee’s My Bicycle and I is perhaps the earliest representation of objectum sexuality expressed in literature. Objectum sexuality is a relatively new concept, although it has gained some small amount of public attention with individuals of this sexuality appearing in media such as The Tyra Banks Show and Good Morning America. Objectum sexuality can be defined as the sexual attraction to nonhuman objects. These relationships are as completely valid as those with people and, as in the case of Erika Eiffel, can also end in marriage. In this work, objectum sexuality is possibly portrayed through multiple references to being a companion to her bicycle, an almost excessive amount of time spent with her bicycle, and gratuitous amounts of praise towards her bicycle. However, it can be assumed that her talk of bicycles and horses is a metaphor for relationships in general.
In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," the main character is a woman who has been controlled and conformed to the norms of society. Louise Mallard has apparently given her entire life to assuring her husband's happiness while forfeiting her own. This truth is also apparent in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this story, Nora Helmer has also given her life to a man who has very little concern for her feelings or beliefs. Both of these characters live very lonely lives, and both have a desire to find out who they really are and also what they are capable of becoming. Although the characters of Nora and Louise are very much alike in many ways, their personalities differ greatly when it comes to making decisions regarding the direction of their lives.
The "Body Image" - "The Body Image" Readings for Writers. 14th ed. of the year. Boston: Monica Eckman, 2013. 310.
What is a dream deferred? Is it something children imagine and lose as they grow up. Do dreams ever die, as we find out, the world is it what it seems. The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and Harlem by Langston Hughes talk about dreams deferred. It shows a African American family struggling to make their dreams a reality. Although Walter, Ruth, Mama, and Beneatha live in the same house, their dreams are all different from each other.
The Jayhawks, “Waiting for the Sun” vs Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”. I was in shock when I heard this one. I love Tom Petty and was surprised to hear how similar these two are. “Waiting for the Sun” is a great song that I have never heard before and I immediately heard the similarity to Tom Petty.
Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems,” which explore the nature of lesbian love, differ strikingly from classic love poems written by a man to a woman, such as Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face.” Rich’s poems focus on the “us” aspect of love, the concept of two strong, yet imperfect women facing all oppositions together, while the love poems written by men are far more reverent, almost worshipful of their subjects. The lesbian poems have a sense of love being “real”, a connection based on far more than physical attraction, whereas the men’s poems focus on an idealized view of the woman: beautiful, pure, distant. The women in Marvell and Campion’s poems are lovely façades, storybook figures without any real depth or imperfections. Perhaps the lesbian love poems could be seen as less eloquent, or less flawlessly romantic, but the romance in them is found in the genuine nature of the love. Rich is doubtlessly writing about experiences she has had, real people she has loved, whereas Marvell and Campion could ostensibly be writing about any beautiful, but otheriwse characterless, woman that they’ve seen.
I chose “Birches” from Mountain Interval which was written by Robert Frost during the early 1900’s. “Birches” is a complex poem, yet it isn't to some. When we first read the poem, all I could think of was how the poem just wasted 10 minutes of my life. Yet after some research I found out that Robert Frost is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize 4 times. So there had to be more to this poem than just a farm boy talking about swinging on trees in the woods. Many believe it openly refers to sexual matters, but its view of sexuality is not simple. The theme, obviously is in it's depiction of the boy's desire to bring the father's trees to submission. The trees, however, are rich symbols of several things: they contain enamel that is crazed as they click upon themselves and are shattered by the sun in an avalanche and are reduced to rubble; though not destroyed they are crippled. Some would argue that the repetitive motion of swinging is masturbatory, but it is accompanied by a primal scene fantasy suggested by the clicking "upon themselves" and he is enraged by it and so seeks to master the whole scene; to cool it off by encasing it [in] ice is not enough: the parents' sexuality must be permanently bent. Furthermore, the mother/girl is placed in a position of perpetual subservience: "Like girls on hands and knees."
“I, being born a woman and distressed/ By all the needs and notions of my kind/ Am urged by your propinquity to find/ Your person fair, and feel a certain zest/ To bear your body’s weight upon my breast.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was an openly-bisexual female poet in the 20th century who wrote about the female experience in regards to love and sex, which is evident in poems like “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”, “Thursday” and “First Fig.” Edna St. Vincent Millay shows us how we can use tone to redefine the relationship between gender and power.
Oppression through Sizeism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person’s size (Sizeism). Throughout the poem “homage to my hips” Clifton suggests that through Sizeism she learned to hate her “hips” because she was a young black woman who did not fit within Caucasian standards of beauty. Clifton writes “I have known [my hips] to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!” highlighting positive images of the female body that parallel the negativity of female oppression. Clifton emphasizes that men do not hold real power at the mercy of a woman and her charm, for a woman who learns to love everything about herself, including her body holds the greatest power against a man. The perspective Clifton takes in her poem can be attributed to the fact that her “poetry is rooted in her experiences as an African American woman raised in an impoverished urban environment, who has a strong and enduring love for family and community” (Lucille