Sexuality Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Sexuality - Essay Example In some cases, the discourses focused on the struggle between patriarchal forces and the forces of feminist responses. Thesis Although gender and sexuality tend to define categories and identities within some cultural frames of references, these discourses often get disrupted by other forces such as class, and race, which eventually determine the manner in which they are represented at individual level, group, societal and national levels. Roadmap This paper will focus on some readings and films with the objective of determining the manner in which they represent the subject of gender and sexuality. The major topics will revolve around gender, race, and class. Gender Vast amounts of literature and films explore the dynamics and challenges that are anchored on the discourses of gender and sexuality. These films and readings cover some of the dominant themes within this discourse including power, subjugation, tribulation, emancipation, cultural factors, and empowerment. Many convergent themes on the matter continue to attend to the matter including the possibility of creating structures that would redeem the oppressed gender from the systematic structural disadvantages that make it difficult for them to gain any meaningful progress within the discourse human development. Radical approaches on both feminism and patriarchy have often been attributed to the rise of gay, lesbianism, homoeroticism, bisexuals, heterosexuals, and other categories that cut across both men and women. As such, the line of demarcation has been erased to an extent that multiple possibilities could exist within the same individual. However, gender, race, and class remain the most dominant discourses that determine the gender and sexuality. Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, explores the psychological tensions and damage that result from the systematic and structural oppression from the patriarchal system. The narrator is a woman who struggles from a mental con dition in a house in which her husband confines her. She observes a strange and disturbing pattern of an oppressed woman in the wallpaper. Retaining her in the house symbolizes some aspect of triumph by the patriarchal forces by retaining her to her domestic role within the expectations of the custom on gender roles. The narrator’s final act of tearing down the wallpaper symbolizes an act of defiance against the gender design that subjugates women and imprisons them within the domestic space. Gilman’s short story is comparable in theme to the film Rabbit- Proof Fence directed by Philip Noyce. The film focusses on the plight of three aboriginal girls attempt to escape from the stifling conditions imposed onto them by the captors and tormentors who want to exploit them for some higher goals of social transformation. In this film, the three young girls are not defined in any terms larger than their sexuality and gender. Their captors intend to train them to be future hous e helps for the white people. They also hope that the girls would eventually get married to the white community in order to erase rid the aboriginal community of the â€Å"impure† elements. The struggle of the three girls to redeem themselves from the retrogressive social roles imposed on them underlines a deep-seated gender division that actively violates the rights and liberties of the female gender for their own private gains. Race The subjugation of women becomes even more complicated when perceived from the perspective of race.