Research Quest: How do texts shape our experiences as Americans? How are our ideas about gender, race, class or other social identities shaped and even constructed by texts?
This project is designed to help you think through your gender identity as it has been shaped by our cultural ideas about what is masculine and feminine. As we witnessed in our readings of Truth’s speech and Patmore’s poem, the texts around us inevitably shape our gender identities and how we view the gender roles performed by others. The paradigm we are using for this course asks us to consider how our perceptions of many identities are often formed by media, literature, and pop culture. Your goal here is to meditate on your history as a reader and how a text constructs a gender or other identity as a participant in American culture. This can include not just books, but also music, movies, video games, television shows, and other “texts. In order to explore this particular research quest, you’ll use a research method known as autoethnography.
What is an autoethnography?
It is not a traditional personal narrative, not about a single event, incident or experience (although you might include an experience). It is not a simple description or story. An autoethnography is an objective and analytic account, written usually to explain one group or culture to another, but with an “insider’s” perspective. The author is positioned both “inside” and “outside” in that s/he relates a culture to outsiders but has also been a participant in that culture. Remember: an autoethnography has an important critical component; it addresses conflicts or tensions in a culture, which demands that the author also see in from the outside.
Drafting the paper:
This assignment lends itself to experimental or non-linear forms of the essay. You might consider, for example, juxtaposing an objective description of the text/s you’ve read closely, with different interpretations of it. Or you might describe some element as if observed by a foreigner who didn’t know the customs of your culture. Try to make your audience “see” something familiar in a new light, as if they had never seen it before. The most successful essays usually focus on specific details of a culture and lead readers to understand these in new and richer ways.
Ethnography vs. Autoethnography:
An ethnography is an objective and analytic account where the primary source of analysis is the writer’s experience of participating in a particular group, ritual, or location.
An autoethnography relies on memory of scenes and events and analysis of objects and artifacts, language, and behaviors associated with the culture being studied.
- As an autoethnographer you come to your subject with a double stance, being both an insider to the culture and re-seeing it critically from the outside.
- You will want to reflect on the tensions in the culture of gendering you are highlighting as a critical observer and participant.
- You will describe “the way it is” or “how things are done” as a typical American experiencing popular media —based on your experiences in a particular location at a particular time and all that encompasses.
- You may choose to draw evaluative conclusions, or you may leave the conclusions about the cultural practice or artifact implicit.
You can approach this assignment in a number of ways:
- Choose 1-2 specific and influential texts from your history and show how they construct your own gender identity. Consider how masculinity or femininity are defined through characters, language, plot, etc. How did these definitions affect YOU? Were these definitions empowering? Restrictive? Positive? Problematic? Explore the ways in which these definitions continue to affect the how you perform your gender. Support this self-reflection with a close reading of the text or texts you’ve chosen by examining content, style, and other details that support your personal experience of the text or texts.
- Choose 1-2 specific and influential texts from your history and show how they construct an identity that is not your own. Consider how masculinity or femininity or some other social identity is defined through characters, language, plot, etc. How did these definitions affect the way you perceive/d the opposite gender? Were these definitions accurate? Explore the ways in which these definitions continue to affect the how you perceive the opposite gender. Support this self-reflection with a close reading of the text or texts you’ve chosen by examining content, style, and other details that support your personal experience of the text or texts.
- Choose an important text or from your own history and show how it changed your notion of yourself as a man or woman or neither/both. Was this change positive? Enlightening? Repressive? Use a close reading and careful analysis to illustrate this change.
The trick to this first Research Quest is to come up with a text that influenced YOU. Consider a movie you watched a thousand times as a child, a particular recording artist whose lyrics or music videos you worshiped as a teenager, a book you read for school (the one you actually finished) that stuck with you – any “text” that was monumental to your experience. For this first essay, you are really writing to an audience of your peers – not hardcore feminists or experts in gender construction theory – so consider how to communicate your reflection for this audience and don’t worry so much about being impressive!
This should be 1000 – 1500 and typed in MLA format and submitted as a Word doc via Canvas.
GRADING RUBRIC:
Primary Source Reading: Close reading of 1-2 texts is substantive, detailed, and focused on the goal of analyzing/exploring a gender construction. (50 points)
Self Reflection: Writer explains in well-supported reflection and narrative how the text(s) helped shape or challenge his or her own attitudes and understandings of a particular gender construction. (25 points)
Style and Clarity: Ideas are organized, claims are supported, thesis is clear and well-substantiated. Sentence level writing is proof-read for error and style/mechanics choices help communicate ideas clearly. (25 points)
English 104 