Week 9 Reading

The reading this week was excellent at really drawing out clearer explanations for many of the concepts we have discussed throughout the quarter. For example, "Updating the Genderred Empire" explains how women get excluded from political conversation,and the Scott Long piece produces a step-by-step analysis of how Western media ends up reproducing misconceptions or propaganda without necessarily realizing it. I definitely found these two pieces to be more comprehensive, easy to follow, and interesting than the "homonationalism and biopolitics" excerpt that we read. I found the latter piece to be wordy and difficult to follow.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the other two articles for Monday, so I'm going to focus on those two.

The writing style in "Updating the Gendered Empire" was intriguing and really kept the flow of the piece going. I really liked the activity that the author mentioned in the beginning (where every person in the room took on the role of a different women who could have affected or been affected by the U.S. base), and I felt that it was a great introduction for the author's ultimate point that women play a crucial role in international politics, even if that role is often disregarded. I thought that the personal stories mentioned, like those of Suraya Parlika and Raja Habib Khuzai really explained how both "neckties" and "warlords" disregard women's opinions in the Islamic states that are mentioned. Their stories also exemplify the ways in which Western nations - the Bush administration is specifically mentioned - fail to help the women as well. Therefore, the writing style for this piece really complimented the subject mater.

The same can be said for the Scott Long piece. This article was definitely more analytically written, but I thought that that was perfect for the nature of the piece. There was one page in particular (page 691 in our course packet, or page 123 in the article) that was a list that systematically showed how Tatchell misunderstood the Mashhad case and how that viewpoint became widespread around the world. The outline was very clear, and I was shocked that the idea of "Islam's war on homosexuality" may have come about simply through a misunderstanding of Farsi. That page was just one example of how the entire article spells out complicated details in a simple way, which I found to be very rewarding and interesting.