Many of us like to think that we are the authors of our own lives, that we are independent, autonomous actors who determine our own fate. For this assignment, you will challenge this way of thinking by writing a chapter of your own sociological memoir. You will draw from personal experience during a period of your life, with two goals:
1) You should correctly identify and describe the impact of social forces relevant to the personal experience(s) you narrate. This includes the impact of social institutions (e.g. family, education, religion), social constructions (e.g. gender, race, ability), and social norms.
2) You should reflect on how your personal experience being Asian American reveals something about the social world that you might otherwise not have seen. What does your experience teach you about gender, race, and the social construction of mental health? What does your experience with a chronically ill parent teach you about family, age, and ableism? What does your experience with political or religious disagreement with family or friends teach you about community and inclusion/exclusion? What does your experience struggling in school teach you about class, race, and education?
Some guidelines:
You might select a very specific period in your life (or even just one day), or you might focus on a broader period of time. Neither approach is inherently better. Your memoir should examine your life through a sociological lens. This means explaining your life beyond your individual agency or the agency of your parents, siblings, teachers, friends, mentors. In other words, your memoir should be less about the choices you make (or that your family makes) and more about correctly identifying and describing the social forces that have constrained and defined these choices and shaped your life. At the same time, be wary of generalizing beyond your experience. Don’t make broad statements about all of society, but rather focus on the world(s) you grew up in. You should continually ask yourself how you know whether something is individual or social. Don’t write about society as if it were a person, e.g. “Society tells us…” or “Society makes us…” Instead, identify specific actors, e.g. “The advertisements and television shows I watched as a middle schooler all celebrated a specific kind of female body type. At my school, these norms were also in place, and girls who followed these norms were rewarded in particular ways, while girls who did not follow them were punished in particular ways.
In brainstorming, you might challenge yourself to consider social forces that you don’t typically assign importance to because of privilege you may exercise. For example, white people sometimes don’t appreciate the importance of race, able-bodied people don’t appreciate the importance of ability, etc.
This is not a research paper, and you do not need to find or use any outside sources (though you can use a few if you find it helpful, including things we’ve read in class). Your memoir should still have a clear argument; you should try to convince your reader of your sociological Interpretation and analysis.
The paper should be clearly organized with an introduction (and thesis statement) and conclusion. Be aware of and intentional about the “flow” of your writing. Avold a year-by- year breakdown of your life. It should be very clear how each piece of the memoir fits into your larger argument.
Some choose to write about their life in the first half of the paper, and then analyze it in the second half. Others prefer to integrate story with analysis throughout. Do whatever you think works best for your argument. Neither approach is inherently better.
Your memoir should be about 10-11 pages long and should be proof read with pages numbered,double spaced in times new Roman font.
