1 b class 19

1 b class 19

• 2.
  Daily Agenda  VocabularyExam: re-take or make-up  Terms list 4: (The terms exam will be on the last class day of the quarter. It will include a comprehensive terms test, which will emphasize the new terms.)  Discussion: Trickster Characters from our reading In-class writing: Essay 4: outline and thesis  Author lecture: Sui Sin Far
• 4.
  Terms for Exam4: A Comprehensive Test  Gender Identity: The sense of “being” male or “being” female. For some people, gender identity is in accord with physical anatomy. For transgender people, gender identity may differ from physical anatomy or expected social roles. It is important to note that gender identity, biological sex, and sexual orientation are not necessarily linked.  Heterosexism: The concept that heterosexuality is natural, normal, superior and required. A system of beliefs about the superiority of heterosexuals or heterosexuality evidenced in the exclusion, by omission or design, of gay, lesbian and bisexual persons in assumptions, communication, policies, procedures, events, or activities.  Heterosexual: A person who is primarily and/or exclusively attracted to members of a gender or sex that is seen to be “opposite” or other than the one with which they identify or are identified.
• 5.
  • Homosexual: Aperson who is primarily and /or exclusively attracted to members of what they identify as their own sex or gender. Because the term possesses connotations of disease and abnormality, some people do not like to identify as homosexual. Still others do not feel that it accurately defines their chosen identity. • Lesbian: One who identifies as a woman who is primarily or exclusively attracted to others who identify as women. • Sex Reassignment (SRS): A surgical procedure that modifies one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. This process was formerly called a “sex change operation,” a phrase now considered offensive.
 • Sexual Orientation: A person’s emotional, physical and sexual attraction and the expression of that attraction with other individuals. Some of the better-known labels or categories include “bisexual,” “multisexual,” “pansexual,” “omnisexual,” “lesbian,” “gay” (“homosexual” is a more clinical term), or “heterosexual.”

• 6.
  • Trans: Abbreviationfor transgender, transsexual, or some other form of trans identity. “Trans” can invoke notions of transcending beyond, existing between, or crossing over borders.
 • Transgender: An umbrella term used to describe people who do not fit into traditional gender categories, including transsexuals, transvestites or cross-dressers, intersexuals or hermaphrodites, and sometimes, even people who identify as butch or femme. Can invoke notions of transcending beyond, existing between or crossing over borders.
 • Transition: The period when one is changing from living as one sex or gender to a different conception of sex or gender. Transitioning is complicated, multi-step process that may include surgically and/or hormonally altering one’s body.
• 9.
  The Question  Doesthe trickster perform fundamental cultural work?  In understanding the trickster better, do we better understand ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of ourselves that respond to the trickster’s unsettling and transformative behavior?  In understanding the trickster better, do we better understand our limitations? Our culture? Our biases? Or boundaries? Or something else?
• 10.
  Are there remnantsof this early definition of the trickster in our modern day characters? Which?  “Everywhere one looks among premodern peoples, there are tricky mythical beings alike enough to entice any human mind to create a category for them once it had met two or three. They are beings of the beginning, working in some complex relationship with the High God; transformers, helping to bring the present human world into being; performers of heroic acts on behalf of men, yet in their original form. or in some later form, foolish, obscene, laughable, yet indomitable” (Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 15).
• 11.
  Does this definitionresonate with us in terms of our modern trickster characters? How?  According to [Paul] Radin, for example, “Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. . . . He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being” (xxiii).
• 12.
  Do we seeour trickster characters in this more contemporary definition? Who?  [The trickster] actually is immoral (or at least amoral) and blasphemous and rebellious, and his interest in entering the societal game is not to provide the safety-valve that makes it tolerable, but to question, manipulate, and disrupt its rules. He is the consummate mover of goalposts, constantly redrawing the boundaries of the possible. In fact, the trickster suggests, says Hyde, “a method by which a stranger or underling can enter the game, change its rules, and win a piece of the action” (204).
• 13.
  Can we revisethis idea to apply it to our texts or characters?  Not just any rogue or anti-hero can properly be termed a trickster. The true trickster’s trickery calls into question fundamental assumptions about the way the world is organized, and reveals the possibility of transforming them (even if often for ignoble ends). In this regard it is not surprising that innovative uses have been made of the modern incarnation of the trickster in American novels produced by writers of dual ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in whose worlds boundaries have continually to be mediated and assumptions challenged.
• 14.
  Are our Characters modern Tricksters? How do we know?  The self-reflexivity associated with the [contemporary trickster] is absent in the ancient “unconscious” trickster, like Wakdjunkaga, whose hands fought each other and who was unaware that his anus was part of his own body. The contemporary trickster, by contrast, is largely self-aware, unlike his/her archaic counterpart. “[T]he pressures of experience produce from that somewhat witless character a more sophisticated trickster.”
• 15.
  A New Ageof Tricksters? Are they tricky? Or in Earnest?  [A] new age brings a transmutation and a new repertoire of tricks. In fact, we may now have reached the stage of ultimate ambiguity, where the trickster’s self-awareness and self-reflexivity call into question even what is a trick and what is in earnest, or on what side of the boundary truth lies, if indeed there are any more “sides” or any unequivocal truths (Lock).
• 17.
  Sui Sin Far EdithMaud Eaton 1865-1914
• 18.
  Sui Sin Far,born Edith Maude Eaton, was the first writer of Asian descent published in North America She was born in England, in 1865 to a Chinese mother and an English (white) father. Eaton's mother was apparently schooled in England although she returned to China after her education was completed. Eaton's father was a merchant who did trading in China; it was on one of his business trips that he met and fell in love with his future wife. According to Eaton scholars, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, "interracial marriage was taboo in both cultures[; thus,] theirs was an unusual union." At age seven, Eaton and her family left England and immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in the early 1870s, settled in a Montreal suburb.
• 19.
  Eaton started hercareer at Hugh Graham's Montreal Daily Star newspaper as a typesetter at age eighteen. Her first short stories were published in the Dominion Illustrated in 1888; she also maintained her administrative duties as well as submitted newspaper articles. It was in her journalistic writing that Eaton openly identified herself as a Chinese American and explained her biracial heritage to her readers. She wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a childhood nickname that means "water lily" in Chinese. Her sister, Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used Onoto Watanna as her penname.
• 20.
  Yi Bu WangHua In the mid 1890s, Eaton moved briefly to Jamaica, where she contracted malaria, from which she never quite recovered. During the next ten years, until 1909, she lived in Seattle and San Francisco. She wrote more articles and short stories and gained a literary reputation. Chinese American women were at the center of much of Eaton's writing, and she worked to break down cultural stereotypes. In 1909, Eaton moved to Boston where she compiled a full-length selection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which was published in Chicago in 1912. In 1913, Eaton, stricken by horrible rheumatism and bad health, returned to Montreal. She died on April 7, 1914 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. In gratitude for her work on their behalf, the Chinese community erected a special headstone on her tomb inscribed with the characters "Yi bu wang hua" ("The righteous one does not forget China").
• 21.
  A Spiritual Foremother Knownas "spiritual foremother of contemporary Eurasian authors," Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations, a literary biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui Sin Far scholars include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James Doyle, and Annette White-Parks. Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of her time and place, in late nineteenth-century sinophobic and imperialistic Euro-American nations, then we admit that for her, a Eurasian woman who could pass as white, to choose to champion the Chinese and working-class women and to identify herself as such, publicly and in print, an act of great determination and courage."
• 22.
  The Reception ofChinese by White Americans To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical and social context, namely the reception of Chinese by white Americans before and during her period. Though the Chinese were never enslaved in this country, as were Africans, they were brought here in large numbers as indentured laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California by the discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s thousands of Chinese laborers were enticed here to construct the mountainous western section of the transcontinental railroad. Almost from the beginning, prejudice against them was strong. They were regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that made them inassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; their hard- working, frugal ways and their willingness to work for lower wages than whites rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of racial violence.
• 23.
  Homework  Reading: Far“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” Post #27 Outline and thesis for Essay #4 Studying: terms