LANE

• Signs of abuse detailed in outlined throughout the story with husband John
• Yellow Wallpaper seen as symbolic representation to the wife’s entrapped lifestyle
• Though the story is about a woman who has a nervous condition, the story is written to help someone from going crazy.

CHRIST

·         The goddess represents (symbolizes) affirmation of female power, female body, female will, and women’s bond and heritage.

·         Symbol has both psychological and political consequences.

·         The goddess is (1) divine female, personification that can be invoked in prayer and ritual (2) symbol of life, death, and rebirth energy in nature and culture, in personal and communal life (3) symbol of the affirmation of the legitimacy and beauty of female power.

OLIVIA JUDSON

·         Explains that sexual behavior of various species, implying the behavior of humans as well

·         Benefits of female promiscuity include: she has run of sperm, her other lovers were sterile, her lovers had lousy genes, other lovers had incompatible genes, her lovers were ugly, she wants diversity in her children, she wants you for your food, she wants help raising the kids

·         She wants to enter your sperm in a competition, she wants to give herself or her eggs a selection of sperm to choose from, she wants to confuse everyone about who’s the father

·         Females obviously sleep around for pleasure. 

·         “sperm in cheap, and eggs are expensive”

·         Female promiscuity is not an accident, but it is an advantage

·         Monogamy is a failed paradigm- serving as a pattern or model

BORNSTEIN

·         Representation of transgender people as a minority group that has remained silent

·         Sexual identity is characterized as subjects [independent dominant force] and objects

·         Gender means class, by calling a gender a system of classification; we can dismantle the system and examine its components.

·         Gender assignments happen when the culture says this is what you are. Gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital.

·         Gender identity answers the question who am I, to which gender (class) do I belong/ want to belong?

·         Gender roles are collections of factors that answer’s the question how do I need to function so that society perceives me as belonging or not belonging to a specific gender?

·         Textual cues- histories, docs, names, relationships

·         Mythic cues weaker sex, dumb blonde, strong silent type, better hair

·         Power dynamic- mode of communication, common technique, degrees of aggression, assertiveness, persistence, ambition

VALENTI

·         Sexuality defined by the moment virginity was lost

·         A woman’s worth lies in her ability or refusal to be sexual

·         If virginity is a gift, it means that lack it are somewhat useless

·         Idea that women are somehow less sexual than men and are therefore the gatekeepers of sexual morals.

·         Girls’ sexuality has become our only true valued personal characteristic

·         Sexualization of girls that trafficking, rape, and child pornography isn’t given that same type of attention.

LAKOFF + JOHNSON

·         Three major finding of cognitive science: (1) the mind in inherently embodied (2) thought is mostly unconscious (3) abstract concepts are largely metaphorical

·         Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious

·         Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative, meaning you cannot separate who you are and what you think

·         Cognitive science: empirical study of the world

·         Autopotesis- ideas, places, or things that form your reality

·         The use of metaphor is inevitable

LANGER

·         Significant form-how we relate to space or place, must contain either prospect or refuge

·         Embodiment (embodied realism) [where one is situated in the environment]- the idea that an individual comes in contact with is an experience an individual has

·         One without the other loses its meaning within significant form

·         Signal vs. Symbol

·         Symbol: any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction.

·         Expression vs. Impression

·         Significant form ties in with the idea of significance and symbolism

·         Language can be a form

·         Significant form has to do with open and closed systems and how people would understand it

·         Refuge- insular protected place, inwardly focused, intimacy, private

·         Prospect- looking at what is beyond your refuge, deals with embodiment- the idea that anything you come in contact with has to with your experience

·         Environment is an extension of yourself

MERLEAU PONTY

·         Focuses on embodiment and its role in perception, psychopathology, and social relations

·         General themes of existence, freedom, and nature of perception

·         Imagination and the expressivity of the body as a ground for truth and knowledge allows for a philosophy of the flesh that escapes the confines of  philosophy of presence

·         Anchorage- experience of being in the world in a way that cannot be measured or defined

·         Schema- total awareness of my posture in the sensory world

·         The virtual body allows us to extend our habitual behavior beyond the actual situation to the limitless realm of the imaginary.

·         Signal- anything that calls attention to your signals can be audible, visible, or an aroma

·         Symbol represents something

BATTACHARJEE

• Domestic violence is mainly understood within the parameters of gender inequality
• For the collective condition of women to change women must project their experiencing of oppression in their private lives into the public
• Private- patriarchal family home
• Public- applied to the liberal state and the government
• Three different levels of home: (1) conventional domestic view of the heterosexual and patriarchal family (2) extended ethnic communities separate and distinct from other ethnic communities and  (3) nation of origin
• Domestic Violence- reoccurring incidents between two people in an intimate situation/relationship
• For immigrant women, the line between public and private are the merged

KEMPE

·         Used to characterize a clinical condition in young children who have received serious physical abuse

·         Parents of abused children usually have a lower IQ, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity; unstable majors are common among them.

·         Often children are under three years of age and come from an unwanted pregnancy.

MARTIN

·         Scientific stereotypes not only imply that female

      biological processes are less worthy than their male

      counterparts but women are also less worthy than 

      men.

·         Menstruation seen as a negative and wasteful.

·         Texts celebrate sperm production because it is

      continuous from puberty to senescence while they  

      portray female eggs unworthy because it is done

      with at birth.

·        The egg is seen as passive and is swept or even drifts

      along the fallopian tube.

ELIZABETH SHALALA LEO

• Sexuality, gender, patriarchy are modern concepts that Western feminist scholars have unquestioningly utilized in historical inquiry into women in Islam without ample considerations of periodization  or problemization.
• Ideals about sexuality formulated upon misogynistic Aristotelian reasoning during the middle ages.
• History can be shown as a process through which one can find the precursors for modern sexuality and gender construction
• Feminist interpretation is a modern approach to understanding Islam.
• Patriarchy is an inherently unbalanced and unstable to organizational system in which overriding social norms postulate that men are superior to women.

NARAYAN

• Third world feminist ideals are dismissed by the western world
• “westernization” contends with the ideals of third world feminists
• “Arguing that my eventual feminist contestations of my culture have something to do with the culture dynamics of the family life that surrounded me as a child, something that had to do with my early sense of politics of the home”
• Loyalty and respect for culture goes against what is just and happiness.
• Third world feminists should challenge the notion that access to “westernized educations” positions women “outside” of their home cultures

SATRAPI

• Graphic novel [cartoon strip]
• Takes place in the cultural revolution in 1980 in Iran
• Born with religion and dreams of being a prophet “my faith was unshakable”
• “for a revolution to succeed, the entire population must support it”

NAFISI

      ·         By reading western novels to her young students, the 

            girls are able to escape the harsh realities of the world

            they live in, particularly Pride and Prejudice

·         Nafisi faces many battles within this piece including being an educated woman and a feminist during the cultural revolution of 1980

·         Older women in the society are not seen as worth, but instead young virgin girls are seen as desirable.

·         “it is a truth universally that a Muslim man, regardless of is fortune, must be in want of his virgin wife.”

·         Women’s opinion in general is not valued.