The clothes and behaviors depicted in these five photos suggest that boys and girls learn different identities and live out different stories.
ESSAY II: STORIES ABOUT GENDER
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The clothes and behaviors depicted in these five photos suggest that boys and girls learn different identities and live out different stories. |
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What stories have shaped your experience of gender? What roles have you learned to play? How do we learn what it means to be a man or a woman? | |
| Essay II Assignment Sequence | ||
| Date | Homework Due | In-Class Work |
| Day 4 7/17 |
First draft of Essay II due, with metatext (2-3 pages). Read "No-Name Woman" in Speculations (p. 337) and develop a "theory" as with "Two Kinds." Respond using the two-column-entry format. Afterwards, use the focused freewrite format to say what you learned about gender development or relations in China. Finally, discuss what you think is strong (and possibly weak) about this essay, referring to the criteria we developed in class. | Workshop drafts and begin revision of Essay II. Discuss "No-Name Woman," both as readers and writers. |
| Day 5 7/18 |
Second draft of Essay II due, with new metatext. Read Brent Staples essay, "Just Walk On By" (Speculations, 382), and Julia Kasdorf’s "The Knowledge of Good and Evil" (handout). With both pieces do a part-whole analysis. Then respond to each piece by freewriting for a page. With the Staples piece, respond especially to Staples way of solving his problem. With the Kasdorf piece, you could focus especially on your interpretation of the piece. | Workshop drafts and begin revision of Essay II, focusing especially on editing for style and correctness. |
| Day 6 7/20 |
Final draft of Essay II due, printed out, with new metatext and previous drafts. Read the Sanders essay (handout) and do a part-whole analysis. Then write a response to Sanders' way of thinking about men and women and what class has to do with it. | |
This is the only essay this term that will really be "just" a story. It will be about an experience of yours or someone you know that in some way casts some light on how we grow up as boys or girls in this society. These stories will serve as the evidence for Essay III, in which we as a class will attempt to make some generalizations about gender in contemporary U.S. society. But for now, the focus is on telling a story that entertains--and makes us think about gender formation in nonsimplistic ways. Here's an example of such a story written by a student.
Concepts: details as developing idea and restricted by idea, revision as expansion, reading imaginatively--for ideas, audience, purpose, tone and diction, image, beginning-middle-end in a narrative, editing for clarity and correctness
Requirements for Essay II:
+ Tells a story with a sense of scene and climax
+ Reveals something about what it's like to grow up a boy or girl
+ 2-3 pages, typed, double-spaced, following MLA format