1. Values in The Merchant of Venice
1. Literature presents insights into many aspects of life but is also a conveyor of values, naturalising certain ways of understanding ourselves and the world. This is especially true of "The Whole Town's Sleeping" by Ray Bradbury. Built on the dominant ideologies of the time, the text through its r...
The Mishnah, a book of legal rules compiled by Jewish sages in the second century Roman Palestine, depicts a society in which the adult Israelite male is the central character. He is the possessor of wives, children, land and other property. The Mishnah's socioeconomic system is rooted within the re...
In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault provides his opinion on the "repressive hypothesis", which states that since the 17th century, sexuality has been repressed due to external forces such as society, law, politics, the institution of family, etc. This repression started with the rise of the ...
Nay Masculines, you have thus tax'd us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. ... She uses a respected political figure as her defense, saying that even though she is dead, she will still be proof in history that women have worth even in stereotypical masculine roles. ...
Beatrice uses her new distorted powers to exact revenge on those who have wronged her and was able to haunt her murderer until, "his heart burst, and one morning he was found dead in his bed totally deprived of warmth and animation" (136). ...
People are surrounded by subliminal messages wherever they go, either through advertisements, television shows, movies, or toys. They often question their beauty, their intelligence, and for men their masculinity. Everyday, throughout the world there are new discoveries of cultural artifacts that co...
In 1989, Jonathan Larson and Billy Aronson collaborated together to work on a musical project which ended up becoming a well-known rock musical titled Rent. Larson later took Rent under his own hands with Aronson's permission; this musical came out on Broadway in 1996 and came out in movie theatres...
Background of Domestic Violence Domestic violence and psychological abuse are identified as, "behaviors used by one person in a relationship to control the other" (http://www.domesticviolence.org/). Most people believe that it only occurs among women of color, who are married and living in poor communities. They also believe that the causes of it are primarily due to drug and alcohol related content (http://www.domesticviolence.org/). However, all of these assumptions are false; domestic and emotional abuse can happen to anyone, anywhere. According to Futures Without Violence, an o...
The notion of femininity, along with the idea of the female gender role, has substantially changed in the last century. During the early twentieth century, women were subjected to stay within household and were apart of society to clean, raise children, and prepare meals for their families. Any wom...
Gender roles are a theme which is explored in a number of ways in Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre." Bertens discusses how gender roles are culturally assigned, with women traditionally portrayed as weak and passive, whilst men are dominant and independent[1]. Bronte tackles these ideas in her novel, subverting the stereotypical Victorian gender roles and demonstrating groundbreaking new attitudes towards gender roles in society, making her arguably one of the first proponents of the feminist movement. Jane Eyre deals with the entrapment of women, both physically and emotionally; and the li...
Shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of famous radical writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; both of whom exemplified the ideologies of the French revolution. Shelley's mother was a pioneer feminist writer who had made her name with her revolutionary ideas opposing the patriarchal ...
From the late 1980s, research on gender, crime and social issues, has hugely focused on the study of masculinity, and how there has become a correlation between masculinity and violence. Feminists have researched extensively on all types associated with gender, including gay and lesbian, thus acting towards the literature on masculinity slowly increasing within the past 20 years due to the pressure from feminist works. In this essay, I will begin by reviewing theories on masculinity, and evaluating why such ideas create the assumption that violence appears to be associated with masculinity. I ...
