Identity Crisis in a Society Driven World

VCC304: Visual Culture and the Politics of Identity Term Paper Assignment 40% of Final Course Grade Deadline: 25 March 2012 Submit two identical copies of the paper: 1. Hardcopy submitted in Lecture. 2. Electronic copy submitted to Turnitin.com Basic Structure: - 2,500 words (approximately 9 pages) - Double-spaced - 10-12 point font - 1-inch margins (minimum) - Footnotes or Endnotes (your choice) - Complete List of References (formatted according to a single style guide, e.g. MLA) - Proofread for Spelling and Grammar Errors - Include a title Criteria of Evaluation/Grading Rubric 1. Quality of the Writing (spelling, grammar, syntax) and Organization of the Paper. 2. Quality of the Argument (logical, coherent, substantiated and persuasive). 3. Engagement with the Assigned Texts. 4. Analysis of the three principal works under study. 5. Originality of Discussion. 6. Ability to problematize many of the conventional understandings and prevailing assumptions about identity and passing. For example: by NOT arguing that subjects who pass are liars enamored by deception and driven by self-interest, and that the violence that they suffer is of their own making. 7. Ability to critically scrutinize all subject-positions and identity-formations including of those most closely aligned with the normative, and often violent forms of interpellation. This term paper assignment requires you to analyze the psycho-social phenomenon of “passing” as presented in each of the three principal works that we have studied this term: Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990), and Kimberly Peirce's Boy's Don't Cry (1999). Your analysis should be based upon a close reading of each of these works, and on the theoretical-critical texts that we have been reading throughout the term(I can provide the sources to you through messages). Your paper should not solely focus on those subjects who “pass,” but should discuss and critically analyze all of the main subjects involved in each story/scenario. In this way you stand the chance of avoiding the risk and error pointing out by Cornel West, namely, of only talking about the victims when talking about identity. As we have throughout the course, in your paper you will want to scrutinize all subjects, including those that are more closely aligned with hegemonic norms and/or act as perpetrators of violence. Your paper should address the following questions and issues 1. Forms of passing: racial, gender, sexual, and class (and their intersections). 2. Forms of normativity and normalization. 3. Identity and Identification: a. Fantasy and the Phantasmatic b. Imaginary c. Idealization d. Desire, Attraction e. Anxiety, Fear, Terror 4. Performativity 5. Specific operations and inter-relations in the three works of: a. Power (protect thy self) b. Knowledge (know thy self) c. Truth (care for the self) 6. Violence, including the violence of normalization, and of seizing the “truth” of the subject through the imperative that insists that that subject speak the “truth” about itself by claiming identity or allowing an identity to be inscribed upon that subjectivity. Foucault suggests that rather than engage in ideological critique and what he refers to in his interview on “The History of Sexuality” as the “economy of the non-true” (meaning: of only thinking of power in terms of interdiction, repression, repudiation, and false-consciousness or of knowledge in terms of lying and deception), that we understand the politics of identity to be a politics of (the production of) the true. Identity then, is to be understood as the search for the truth of subjectivity. So rather than enter into debates over whether identities—those performed in passing or other forms—are true or false, authentic or not, and whether the subjects performing them are telling the truth or being deceptive (and relatedly, others as being deceived), you will want to ask what it is that constitutes a sense of truth about identity in each of these stories, and how that sense of truth mobilizes and activates power relations in which various subjects are caught up, find agency, comfort, pleasure, danger, threats, violence, and even death. Therefore the ways in which truth gets attached or detached from subjects and identities (that is to say, how these subjects are invented and these identities constructed and performed) is what makes the question of the subject and identity, a question of political concern.