Sunday, November 20, 2011

Possible Paper Topic- Could use Advice/ Ideas on where to go

One idea that we have been discussing a lot of in class recently is the idea of space- whether it be queer space or a space for queers that has been taken away, and this has peaked my interest. As I was driving down the street I was looking at people walking and I noticed that women, in general seemed to have less personal space than men. For example, if I saw a group of women walking down the street they were close together, sometime linking arms with those around them where as men would be more spaced out and rarely ever touched them. This got me to thinking about how space operates in general and how it is distributed amongst people. For example, most children have one room in the house which is theirs and sometimes they must share this with another sibling where as the parents lay claim to the whole house. Rich people tend to have larger houses and more land than those without the same wealth. Presidents and other heads of state have a lot more space under their domain than others with out the same political power. I can go on and on, but what I noticed was that how much space a person has is somewhat symbolic of how much power they have. Space provides an area of which someone can have domain over and it is directly tied to power. I want to look at this in terms of spaces that belong to Queer people. Do people who are queer have less space in general than those who are heterosexual. What sort of message is being presented when a bath is built or when it is taken down? How does that exhibit power dynamics? What does queer space afford people and does it operate the same as non queer space in power dynamics? This is what I am mulling over for my final project. I also want to heavily look into how space is presented in films as symbolic representations of power. If you have any ideas for where might be neat to go or any interesting points on this topic please let me know!
Thanks!

3 comments:

  1. Michelle -

    I really like where you're going with your portfolio. I think your'e right on... space is definitely privileged, so it'd be interesting to see how this applies in terms of queer spaces. There are quite a few videos on YouTube that involve pranksters invading others' "personal bubbles" for humor, but there's definitely something a lot deeper about the whole idea of personal space in general. And I think Clyve mentioned it before class, but there's definitely an element of unease when it comes to men and maintaining their personal space. Anyway, good luck on your portfolio, and I look forward to hearing about it next week!

    - terese

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  2. Michelle,

    I think this could be a good topic for your project. You could probably use Butler (I'm not sure if any of her writing deals with queer space, but I assume it does) to build your own theory regarding whether or not queer people have less space due to having less power, and then use Foucault to talk about how the system relates to this condition. Finally, you could also go into public space like we did in class and pair it with personal space to make your essay about the allotment of queer space in general. I hope that helps somehow, good luck on the final project.

    -Ziev

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  3. Michelle-

    In regards to those notions of being "allowed" versus being "forced into" private space, I also happened to think of a couple other movies that might be helpful for your annotated bibliography (and are really awesome). They would be the movies Hamlet 2 (specifically the character of Rand) and RocknRolla (specifically Handsome Bob). Both are fairly recent and can definitely be found on Netflix, though maybe not in instantqueue.

    Hope they help.

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