Instructions: Write a research essay that responds to ONE of the following questions.
Please use first person in your essays and pay attention to the argument you are making when answering the question. We want to hear what you think! In your analysis of the question make sure you engage and reference the relevant course material including, and especially, the assigned weekly readings. Make sure your essay has a clear logical structure and that your argument and analysis flows from your introduction to conclusion, from start to finish.
There is a 10% leeway on the word count but please do not go significantly under or over the word limit. Your in-text citations will count toward your word limit but your Reference List will not.
Please use AUTHOR DATE in-text citations and Harvard or Chicago referencing system and make sure it is correct, consistent and clear to your markers. Don’t forget to include your Reference List at the end of your essay.
Read the GUIDE TO WRITING ESSAYS GEND2001 and pay attention to the Marking Criteria for the essay (both documents can be found under the Assessment folder).
ESSAY QUESTIONS: Q1: Critically discuss how constructions of race and gender are intimately intertwined
with the processes of colonialization.
Q2: How does coloniality (power, gender, knowledge, being) play out in a person’s everyday life? You may want to consider how these structures work in your own life or someone else’s.
Q3: Audre Lorde writes: “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us”. (Lorde, 1996, p. 170)Are Lorde’s words still relevant in 2018? Critically discuss.
Q4: Critically analyse some examples (narrative and/or film technique) from the film Samson & Delilah that complicate traditional gender and racial stereotypes in the Australian context. Your discussion ought to illustrate an awareness of the complexities of thinking through the intersection of gender and race/class in contemporary Australian contexts as well as how film can help us to unpack these.
Q5: Critically discuss why it is important to consider complexities surrounding gender and race when analysing refugee/asylum seeker experiences. In your analysis make links to the specific situations of refugee/asylum seekers in the Australian context.
Q6: Why has the interpretive method (re-reading of the Islamic sacred texts) been important for Indonesian Muslim feminism?
Q7: Identify and describe a historical or a contemporary social movement from Australia or around the world and, using the theory we have engaged with in this course, critically analyse the gender relations or role of women within the movement you have chosen.
Q8: How might we think of Alia Al-Saji’s notion of racialized time in relation to Judith Halberstam’s work on queer temporality? Critically discuss the ways in which their work on time, race, gender and sexuality might overlap or challenge one another’s views.
Q9: In the chapter “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” J. Halberstam writes that “reproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/space constructs” and that “all kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time”. (Halberstam 2005, 10). Critically discuss.
Q10: Select at least one poem by Ishigaki from week 11 and compare and contrast it/them with a relevant text/texts of your choice (from the course) with a special focus on food and gender.
Q11: “Barcelona en Comú isn’t just about feminizing politics — it’s about feminist politics. The platform and its candidates, both women and men, agree that if their “democratic revolution” isn’t feminist, it won’t be deserving of the name.” (Kate Shea Baird)
Critically examine this notion of ‘feminizing politics’ that undergirds the Barcelona en Comú platform. How does this challenge the traditional understanding of politics and political institutions? Does this ‘feminizing politics’ relate to any other topics we have covered in the course?
