A Slacker And Delinquent In Basketball Shoes Analysis

As William Faulkner said so aptly in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” (1951). To most people the past is likely to change often, forever exposed to interpretation that is colored by one’s own

Because of his choices, he reflects, “I didn’t have to fight to get out of the ghetto. I was kicked out.” In the third article “The transformation of silence into Language and Action” A black lesbian poet who struggles because of society misunderstandings, focuses on action rather than silence. She believes that we have to speak out and act if we want to reach our goals and dreams, otherwise we would be struggling and feeling uncomfortable.

For example, when Denise as a teenager comes out to her friend, she states that “some black people think being gay’s a choice. And when they find out that their kid is gay, they try to figure out what they did wrong”. Catherine internalizes the pressure as a black, lower class, single mother to consent to hegemony, and through this, she outwardly disapproves of her daughter being gay because it makes her feel as though she failed to raise her daughter properly. Similarly, Catherine internalizes racial stereotypes and projects them onto Denise through her stating that she should have played basketball. Her statement, “a basketball scholarship would’ve come in real handy right now.

While he looks fondly on memories of the past the looming presence of the present and future are very prominent throughout his essay. Their expert use of narration assists the telling of their stories and how they view their past experiences.

The author of this piece is trying to show how our past can destroy our

The queer historical past has been characterized positively, with aspects such as identification, desire, longing, and love highlighted (31). In contrast, Heather Love seeks to focus on the negative aspects that characterize the relationship of queer history amid the past and present, in her work, “Emotional Rescue: The demands of Queer History,” the first chapter in her book, “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History” (31-32). According to Love, some queer critics have failed to include the harsher accounts when studying queer cross-historical relations. The negative aspects of the past that queer figures can relate to makes it relevant. In her article, Love critiques various works to identify the negative aspects present within the queer history.

This novel follows the life of a recent college graduate, Marian MacAlpin, through her career and emotional maturation in a somewhat unnatural, if not threatening world. The queer concept of this world is branded by a spectrum of moral viewpoints of gender politics that manifest themselves and surround Marian. The political and cultural values and practices of a male dominated and sex driven society depicted in the novel are so strong that they seem to devour Marian physically and emotionally. She rebels against this cannibalistic, patriarchal society through a comestible mode and the end, reclaims her identity crisis by restoring her relationship with

Often times, queer young adult literature highlights issues that plague adolescents without ever providing an account that feels authentic for its readers. Chulito by Charles Rice-Gonzalez is a gripping fictional account of what it means to be young, gay and Puerto Rican in New York City. Rice-Gonzalez is a lecturer at Hostos Community College and a longtime LGBT activist within the Bronx. Set in the South Bronx, Chulito explores a variety of themes, including masculinity, gayness, identity, and love. In this book, Rice Gonzalez highlights the importance seeing masculinity as being complex instead of dichotomous-

In what X considers to be transitional literature by ABV, ABV mixes science fiction with myth… The end result is a play that By virtue of complex technical devices, Antonio Buero Vallejo effectively portrayed the moral consequences of the Spanish civil war still present thirty years on in his drama El tragaluz. One of the most significant devices used by Buero Vallejo is the dramatization of time. This essay will examine Buero Vallejo’s use of temporality in unveiling the human condition and its demise, the impact of war on the family and what Buero considered the changing values of society in the wake of technological encroachment in the twentieth century.

In the poem History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey, Trethewey uses nostalgic tone, sentimental mood and contrasting imagery to remind people of the tainted past of American history and encourage people to hope for a better future. The poem addresses the struggles and hardships that the African-Americans had experienced during the period of racial segregation and how this phenomenon slowly disappeared and changed over time. In the first two stanzas, the speaker of the poem is reminiscing about her past through a photograph of herself. In the photo, she was a small girl in a bright flowered bikini who is “[curling] around wet sand” with her toes dug in the sand, perhaps she was painting or doodling “on the wide strip of Mississippi beach.”

We can identify a characteristic of gender roles through the eyes of the persona. The nurturing nature of the mother can be seen when she ‘dried [the child’s] tearful face’. Contrasting to the father who ‘whistling, [comes] home from work’, through the alliteration portrayed through the father as the bread winner of the family and thereby the guardian of the household. By drawing attention to these gender roles in the context of childhood memory, the persona is subliminally implying the permanent repeated display of gender roles throughout generations and how it has not changed. However, this observation is downplayed by refocusing on the childhood memories as the combinations of events ‘milk and story-books / the gathered flowers / my mother’s golden brown hair’, psychoanalytically reveals the significance of childhood memories in their ability to evoke nostalgic and pleasing emotions to distract the audiences thoughts on gender roles.

Nella Larsen’s Passing is a novella about the past experiences of African American women ‘passing’ as whites for equal opportunities. Larsen presents the day to day issues African American women face during their ‘passing’ journey through her characters of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. During the reading process, we progressively realize ‘passing’ in Harlem, New York during the 1920’s becomes difficult for both of these women physically and mentally as different kinds of challenges approach ahead. Although Larsen decides the novella to be told in a third person narrative, different thoughts and messages of Irene and Clare communicate broken ideas for the reader, causing the interpretation of the novella to vary from different perspectives.

Bednarska, Passing Last Summer; keyword: queer Keyword: Queer Bednarska does not directly define “queer” or “queerness,” but a few sentences hint to its definition. The second to last page, “I’m fully aware that my desires around the kind of sex I want could change over time, depending on the partner and the possibilities and the mutability of our own desires.” Main Argument: Bednarska gives an overview of the dynamic complex fluidity that gender and sexual attraction should have and those that exist outside the limited categories. Throughout, she explains that many people she knows that activities and interests change over time, just like emotions do.

She is reminded of the violence that torn not only communities apart but families as well. How the social norms of the day restricted people’s lives and held them in the balance of life and death. Her grandfathers past life, her grandmother cultural silence about the internment and husband’s affair, the police brutality that cause the death of 4 young black teenagers. Even her own inner conflicts with her sexuality and Japanese heritage. She starts to see the world around her with a different

In Separate Pasts, Melton A. McLaurin revisits his youth days that he spent during the 1950s in Wade, North Carolina, a small segregated town. McLaurin’s family had a good living status in Wade, his father had a job in an insurance company and his grandfather owned a convenience store, where he used to work. McLaurin worked in his grandfather’s store since he was in the seventh grade and he worked there until he left for college. During McLaurin’s time working in the store, he was familiar with many blacks as many of them used to live close to the store. McLaurin liked having conversation with the blacks and in Separate Pasts, he remembers the time that he spent with some of the blacks, who challenged his personal beliefs in terms of racial prejudice and segregation.