Laura T. Smith: Teaching

I know I said about twenty times throughout the semester that I would post this, so here you go: 81 words
This story is called 81 words it's "The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness."
To listen click on 'full episode' it will stream in a new window.

I really enjoyed reading Fun Home, and I think I am going to buy the whole book. I thought a very interesting part of the reading was when she decided to buy a pocket knife. She mentioned that "it seemed like something a lesbian would have," and then she cut her finger with it the moment she opened it. This was really funny, and definitely something many people questioning their sexuality do: Doing things out of the ordinary to fit a new identity they've taken on.

Last week I wanted write about the piece of art that I thought was the most interesting. But when I sat down to write, I saw that someone else had already written about it. The piece I wanted to write about was the pile of candy in the museum. As the lecturer described to us the significance of the candy, my jaw dropped. What a genius and passionate idea for art. For days after class, I shared the story of the children excited to see the candy, the significance of its weight, and how people are allowed to take a piece.

In class, when we looked at "The Disease Collector" I got a little confused because at first I thought the poem was talking about an actual culture. So once he got to the culture being a petri dish testing for AIDS, it was pretty shocking. The key word here is swab, if you overlook that small word in the first line you can become lost by the middle of the sonnet.

loveconjure/blues is not capitalized, has no spaces, contains a slash and is very unclear in meaning. Each word carries various meanings. Love could mean sex, a promise, a feeling, or something much more transcendental and hard to define. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, conjure has a great many meanings: to conspire, to plan, to trick, to cure, to be sworn together, to constrain by oath, to implore, to invoke supernatural power, to bring out, to exorcise, or to quiet.

In class on Thursday I realized how frustrated I am with the topic of race and queer theory. As I tried to sum up for myself, there are two kinds of people, people who want to make this world better, and people who want to make a new better world. Ford is using queer theory to explore race. Although I think his point that "queer theory offered [him] an alternative mode... of engagement"(68) is good for reducing the "pretentious and preachy diction"(68) in writings on the subject, I don't think that queer theory is completely helpful in the issue of race.

Why do all of the hallucinations/dreams in Tony Kushner's play have rules? They all rely on principles, some of which are broken but nevertheless exist. Kushner constructs these rules so that the audience can suspend belief, but still take the play very seriously.

So I really wanted to see Riki Wilchins, but I had to do a shift at the radio station during her talk. I arrived at Witeck's talk at 7:30 because that's when we thought it started, and he was already at least half way through. Even though I didn't get to hear the beginning of his speech, I believe I understand the message he was trying to bring across. Witeck mostly did a recap of all the ways the mainstream communications and media companies are becoming more accepting of the LGBT community.

This piece was very interesting because Halperin reflected upon the ancient Athens to answer the question of what sexuality is, and if there is a history of it. He exhaustively explains that in the "pre-bourgeois world" (which he quotes from Padgug) sexuality was non-issue. In Athens, Sex was showing domination over a person of a lower caste. To these ancient people sex was a function of their role in culture. Sexuality and sexual preference as defined by this history is no different than the type of food you enjoy.