Indiana Jones and the Quest for Tenure

One of my colleagues at Savage Minds posted the trailer for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, drawing special attention to the last line. For all the part-time teachers out there, this one’s for you! [Continue reading]

Notes Towards a Gender Analysis of the X-Men

Female X-Men

Power comes from control over their surroundings or other people; beautiful (some would say “stacked”)

  • Dr. Jean Grey: intuitive, empathic, manipulates people and things from a distance
  • Storm: controls natural forces
  • Rogue: consumer, parasite; saps men of their vital powers

Male X-Men

Power comes from ability to physically defeat opponents; some good-looking, some not so much (e.g. Nightcrawler)

  • Psyclops (sp?): creates energy, destroys all in his sight; male gaze destroys opponents
  • [Continue reading]

Gender and Sexuality Reading List

This is where I, the blogger, ask you, the reader, for your input. I’d like to put together a booklist of works relating to sex and gender. Not non-fiction — that’ll come later — but works of fiction that deal with these issues in interesting and useful ways, the kind of stuff you might assign a class on “Sex and Gender in Literature”. For instance, Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God explores the the way blackness and womanhood shape the lives of both men and women in the rural South, as well as offering at least one avenue towards empowerment (as I recall — it’s been over 15 years since I read it). Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises deals with a particular kind of (Hemingwayian) emasculated masculinuty. [Continue reading]

Notes on the Matrix

I wasn’t going to write about the new Matrix film here. I’ve been posting comments to some of the discussions of the film around the blogosphere, but didn’t feel I had enough to say to make it worth a post of my own. But it’s a funny thing–certain ideas kept reprocessing, some of my earlier sureties about the movie have come under question, and I find myself admiring the movie a lot more today than I did when I saw it 10 days ago. And then I read William Blaze’s take on the political implications of Matrix: Reloaded (via Doc Searls), and it all clicked together. So, for better or worse, here are my thoughts (or a selection of them, anyway) on the Matrix. [Continue reading]