Self Inquiry: How I Was Gendered
Inquiry: How do texts shape my experience as an American man or woman? How are our ideas about gender shaped and even
constructed by texts?
This project is designed to help you think through your gender identity as it has been shaped by our cultural ideas
about what is masculine and feminine. As we witnessed in our readings of childhood fairytales and stories, the texts
around us inevitably shape our gender identities and how we view the gender roles performed by others. The
paradigm we are using for this much of this course asks us to consider how our perceptions of “female” and “male”
are often formed by media, literature, and pop culture. Your goal here is to meditate on your history as a reader
and how a text constructs your gender identity as a reader or as a participant in American culture. This can include
not just books, but also music, movies, and other “texts.”
You can approach this assignment in a number of ways:
1. Choose 1-2 specific and influential texts from your history and show how they construct your gender
identity. Consider how masculinity or femininity are defined through characters, language, plot, etc. How
did these definitions affect YOU? Were these definitions empowering? Restrictive? Positive? Problematic?
Explore the ways in which these definitions continue to affect the how you perform your gender. Support
this self-reflection with a close reading of the text or texts you’ve chosen by examining content, style, and
other details that support your personal experience of the text or texts.
2. Choose 1-2 specific and influential texts from your reader history and show how they construct the gender
identity that is not your own. Consider how masculinity or femininity are defined through characters,
language, plot, etc. How did these definitions affect the way you perceive/d the opposite gender? Were
these definitions accurate? Explore the ways in which these definitions continue to affect the how you
perceive the opposite gender. Support this self-reflection with a close reading of the text or texts you’ve
chosen by examining content, style, and other details that support your personal experience of the text or
texts.
3. Choose an important text or from your own history and show how it changed your notion of yourself as a
man or woman. Was this change positive? Enlightening? Repressive? Use a close reading and careful
analysis to illustrate this change.
The trick to this first assignment is to come up with a text that influenced YOU. Consider a movie you watched a
thousand times as a child, a particular recording artist whose lyrics or music videos you worshiped as a teenager, a
book you read for school (the one you actually finished) that stuck with you - any “text” that was monumental to
your experience. For this first essay, you are really writing to an audience of your peers – not hardcore feminists or
experts in gender construction theory – so consider how to communicate your reflection for this audience and don’t
worry so much about being impressive!
This should be 750 - 1000 and typed in MLA format.