Fantasy Dependence in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly M. Butterfly, as its title suggests, is the reworking of Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly. In Puccini’s opera, Lieutenant Pinkerton, a United Sates Navy officer, purchases the conjugal rights to Cio-Cio-San, a fifteen-yrear-old Japanese Geisha girl, for one hundred yen, and marries her with the convenient provision that each contract can be annulled on a monthly notice. Meanwhile, Pinkerton leaves Cio-Cio-San for the United States to marry an American girl, Kate. During his absence, Cio-Cio-San has born him a son, and has been waiting for his return, unaware of his marriage in America. After three years have passed since Pinkerton left her, Cio-Cio-San is visited by Pinkerton’s wife, who attempts to claim his son and take him to the United Sates. Realizing that Pinkerton has abandoned her, Cio-Cio-San commits hara-kiri, saying: “Death with honor is better than life/life with dishonor.” At the end of the opera, Pinkerton arrives only to find Cio-Cio-San dead on the tatami floor. In the Western world, Butterfly represents a stereotype of the Oriental woman. The stereotype of an obedient, submissive, and domestic Asian woman appeals to Westerners through other media beside the opera; for example, the “mail-order bride trade” catalogues and TV spots. The story of the white devil Pinkerton and a sub-missive Asian girl Cio-Cio-San has become a cultural myth in Western world. In M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang parodies and deconstructs this myth. In his play, a French diplomat Rene Gallimard fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his Chinese lover Song is his Butterfly. However, as Hwang says in the “Afterword” of the play, Gallimard “realizes that it is he who has been But... ... middle of paper ... ...tends as the final impression of the play” (61). Works Cited DiGaetani, John Louis. “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” TDR 33(3): 141-53. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: A Plume Book, 1988. ---. “Afterword.” M. Butterfly. 94-100. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. New York: Routledge, 1985. Moy, James S. “David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality On the American Stage.” Theatre Journal 42: 48-56. Shimakawa, Karen. “ ‘Who’s to Say?’ Or, Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly.” Theatre Journal 45: 349-62. Shin, Andrew. “Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Golden Gate.” Melus 27(1): 177-97. Skloot, Robert. “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang.” Modern Drama 33(1): 59-66.
Athletics in American schools have always been controversial for many reasons. Some of these reasons include health concerns, safety precautions, and academic significance. Daniel H. Bowen and Colin Hitt wrote an article titled, “High-School Sports Aren’t Killing Academics” to present the factors of positive correlation between success in athletics and academics. I believe that athletics in high schools not only benefit students socially, but also academically.
Betsy Lucal, "What it means to be gendered me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
perspective on the concept, arguing that gender is a cultural performance. Her careful reading of
Financial aspects and profitability of college athletic programs is one of the most important arguments involved in this controversy. A group of people expresses that college athletic programs are over emphasized. The point they show on the first hand, is that athletic programs are too expensive for community colleges and small universities. Besides, statistics prove that financial aspects of college athletic programs are extremely questionable. It is true that maintenance, and facility costs for athletic programs are significantly high in comparison to academic programs. Therefore, Denhart, Villwock, and Vedder argue that athletic programs drag money away from important academics programs and degrade their quality. According to them, median expenditures per athlete in Football Bowl Subdivision were $65,800 in 2006. And it has shown a 15.6 percent median expenditure increase fro...
The social world in which all people co-exist is an unruly playing field. Separated by class, race, and gender, this world calls for all to assimilate in order to maintain the balance society imposes. Kenji Yoshino raises awareness to the discriminatory aspects of this world in his piece titled “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights”.Yoshino’s argument of the unjust abuse of covering, hiding one’s natural identity to meet the standards that are required of the individual, circle the topics of racial and sexual discrimination. Similarly on a smaller scale, the same concept is depicted through gender inequality (particularly in America) through Michael Kimmel 's “Girls in Guyland: Eyes on the Guys”. Kimmel expresses that both males
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster’s Monkey: His Fake Story (1989) is a “book” about the “West …meeting West” (Kingston 308). She borrows heavily from Chinese myths and legends but at the same time she also alludes to Hollywood movies, western literary tradition and western authors, and strives for some sort of amalgamation of the two. The focus of the novel keeps on shifting from “synthesis to multiplicity” (Janette 145) and the definition of a new form of democracy which accords recognition to this multiculturalism without being exclusionist. Wittman’s play is the “stage” where all the minorities – Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, African American, etc – come together to confront the White America.
Lee, Brian. "Are college sports worth the cost?" PBS (2011): 2. online. 20 November 2013. .
Wood, J. T. (2013). Gendered lives: communication, gender & and culture (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Suicide is possibly the most personal action an individual can take upon oneself and yet it has a profound social impact. A large Hungarian population views an act of violence that one commits toward oneself as an act of bravery for freeing themselves and others around them of their misery. It’s also consider to be the least understood crime even though sociologist and psychologist are expected to know the answers to questions such as why people kill themselves but often these questions go unanswered. Emile Durkheim was instrumental in bringing a new understanding of suicide, “when in a sociological study he conceived his theory of suicide, and it 's relationship with society. Perhaps put more accurately, his theory was about society, and
During the conflict surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, Durkheim used the new field of sociology to try to make sense of society and the world around him. The Dreyfus Affair was a government cover up framing a Jewish captain named Dreyfus. It turned into a political scandal splitting the people of France. As Collins & Makowsky (2010) stated, doing this allowed him to discover that “society is a ritual order, a collective conscience founded on the emotional rhythms of human interaction” (p. 92). The students at the University of Paris were not exempt from conflict and the professors gave lectures for the Dreyfusard cause. He was one of the most renowned of the professors at the University of Paris at the time. He went to Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory to investigate the social sciences though he accepted Comte’s sociology over psychology. He wanted to take sociology and do what Wundt had done with psychology. Durkheim wanted sociology to be a researchable science instead of a philosophy. He became a professor at the Ecole Normale and then became the first chair of the science of Sociology in the early 1900’s. Durkheim published several works on different topics in sociology including suicide, religion, and the ...
"Sula Theme of Gender." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 06 Nov. 2015.
Durkheim (1951) explains, “suicide is applied to any death which is direct or indirect results of a positive or negative acts accomplished by the victim himself…” (42). Suicide is a solidarity act; the cause has a significant connection to various social factors. Durkheim was trying to find a relationship between social interactions amongst individuals and suicide rates in different countries around Europe. “Since suicide in an individual action affecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone” (Durkheim:46). What Durkheim is saying that suicide doesn’t come from within the individual but rather the influence of other factors on the individual. He compares different social factors that would potentially per sway an individual to commit suicide, like religion, domestic factors in a country, and political hardship.
More specifically, Durkheim concluded that each society has a specific inclination towards suicide that is made up of social currents which serve to influence individuals. It is important
In the Article, Ding Culture With Girls Like Me: Why Trying on Gender and Intersectionality Matters, by Susan Williams, Williams examines, outlines, and identifies how race, ethnicity, and class play a role in how girls try on gender, while also gathering information on the intersectional and experimental aspects of the process. She highlights diversity of girl’s experiences to strengthen the ability to asses ways in which societies participate in gender. Williams does this by identifying and highlighting the way girls do gender, examining intersectionality through her concept of trying-on gender, and by including cross-over literature to show how girls make a multi-constructed sense of self. Through this process Williams was able to find that
To lead off, people who disagree say colleges lose money through sports. Those not in favor state University of Michigan football won the Big Ten Conference in the 1998-1999 season and their ticket and apparel sales skyrocketed (College Athletics Programs). Despite their success, they still lost $3.8 million in their athletic department for the year. This is significant because they had a great winning season and a jump in sales but they still lost money that led to the school losing money. The opposition also points out that college athletics cause unneeded scandals for the college university. In 1998, the NCAA penalized Texas Tech for letting a star running back play even though he had a GPA of 0.0 (Sports in America: Recreation, Business, Education, and Controversy). This tells us that some programs do not care about the education side of college athletics. Opponents state that college athletics programs make regular students help fund the athletics programs. Around sixty percent of all Division I colleges have a fee for students to help fund the sports program (College Athletics Programs). This is important because it shows schools make students help pay for the sports programs, which is bad for the students that don’t want anything to do with sports programs, or that may be in