In your last essay, you analyzed how self-expression may appear to be an act of free will, but how our choices could also be limited by external pressure. For this next assignment, you now consider the ways that specific power dynamics not only ‘pressure’ or ‘influence’ individuals, but can actively prevent them from changing. Alva Noe’s “Air Guitar Styles” serves as a useful foundation for understanding how personhood is an act of constant performance and maintenance. Looking at this concept of performance through the lens of gender, Jia Tolentino’s “Always Be Optimizing” makes the case that “feminism has not eradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier” (65). While Tolentino’s text addresses the ‘ideal woman,’ Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel” investigates the practices and effects of the “fourth-class system… a nine-month regimen of small and large indignities intended to ‘strip’ each young recruit of his original identity and remold him into the ‘Whole Man’” (72). We may then understand both ‘the Ideal Woman’ and ‘The Whole Man’ as idealized gender performances, and your task for this paper is to analyze the ways various institutions uphold and perpetuate those idealized constructs.
Citing and analyzing each of these texts, your assignment is to compose an analytic essay in response to the following question:
How is gender performance controlled by larger systems of power? Why?
1 inch margins, times new roman 12 pt font, use the three texts provided with in text citations.
please analyze the three texts to the questions and not just summarize the texts. less summarizing and more analysis please.
at least two quotes from the two different texts in each paragraph except the introduction.
please provide at least two examples of Close reading.
