exercise 1:watch video and answer questions:
watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnfKgffCZ7U
and
After viewing “Crossing the Line: Border Stories” and the other video on race, and reading the chapter in the sociology textbook, answer these questions (100-150 words): Why many Latino/Hispanic immigrants suffer racial/ethnic discrimination and social oppression in the US? What are your views about the anti-immigration policies that the Federal government has sought to put in place during the past 3-4 years?
excersice2: watch video and and answer video
watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJ9GHZ1dl0
and view
After watching the video ” Women’s Liberation Movement” and exploring the materials available at the National Organization for Women (NOW) website, answer these questions (100-150 words): How the social, economic, and political situation of women has changed during the past decades? What role the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the feminist movement have played in the struggle for more gender equality in the US?
exercise 3: watch video and answer questions
watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7HKmu3eMEk
and
After reading the chapter and watching the video “Brothers share one wife – Fraternal Polyandry.”, please answer these questions (100-150words). Can you explain the social, cultural, and economic differences between monogamous and polygamous marital arrangements? What are the economic and cultural reasons for the marital/family structure called “Fraternal Polyandry” that is found in some regions of Northern India, Tibet, and the Himalayas?
exercise 4:
watch video :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teUi8N5ZaNs
Answer the following question in two paragraphs of seven-to-nine sentences each:
In the film “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” does Janie’s story end in triumph, despair, or a combination of both?
Use two scenes from the movie as proof of your position (one scene per paragraph). Describe the scenes that you think show Janie’s triumph, despair, or both, and offer your analysis of how and why these particular scenes prove your point(s).
Some themes in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Gender roles and gender relations to power
Language/voice and its relationship to power
Love
Independence
Thriving rather than surviving
Janie Crawford is a Black woman searching for true, reciprocal love in the 1930s. Janie’s story is similiar to Zora Neale Hurston’s story but Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel–a work of fiction–so don’t make the mistake of thinking that Janie is an exact representation of Hurston. Instead, notice the life experiences and moments that Janie and Hurston share, and notice what’s different as well. You should be more than familiar with Hurston’s life story by now after reading Fire!! and watching the Youtube biographies.
Remember when watching the film that you’re watching an adaptation of the novel: there are so many important scenes from the novel that were left out of the film, which is why folks (including me) say that the book is always better than the movie.
You can tell when I’m talking about the novel because it’s written like this: Their Eyes Were Watching God.
When I’m talking about the film, it’s written like this: “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” You need to do the same thing when you write short answers paper 2.
The story the novel and the film follows is Janie’s life from the age of sixteen to the age of forty on her quest for true, reciprocal, equalitarian love. Janie’s quest begins when she’s a teenager, and stems from her idealized view of nature represented in this passage from the novel: “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
The blooming pear tree filled with blossoms represents Janie’s idealized view of nature. This idealized view of nature becomes her idealized view of love; in the bees’ interaction with the pear tree flowers, Janie witnesses a perfect moment in nature, full of erotic energy, passionate interaction, and blissful harmony. It’s at this moment, under the pear tree, that Janie has her sexual awakening after she experiences her first orgasm through masturbation. The movie condenses the passage quoted above into the scene at 7:37 when Janie stares at the bee on the flower blossom. The “something different” about her is her sexual awakening, which leads to her kissing Johnny Taylor. I’m sharing the passage from the novel so you can better understand Janie’s quest for true, reciprocal, equalitarian love and recognize the importance of Hurston writing about a woman in the 1930s who centers her sexual pleasure. Even today, folks are surprised when a woman writes about centering women’s sexual pleasure so think about what that meant 85 years ago.
Pay attention to the following:
Janie’s marriage to Logan Killicks is an arranged marriage that Janie is forced into by her grandmother. Janie is sixteen when she marries Killicks who is around forty; in the novel we find out that later in life Janie grows to hate her grandmother for forcing her to marry Logan. While Logan isn’t cruel to Janie, he used her like a mule on the farm and he has zero interest in romance which is what Janie wants, needs, and desires.
Janie’s second husband, Joe (Jody) Starks is a male supremacist and a misogynist. He abuses Janie physically, verbally, and emotionally. He’s the walking definition of toxic masculinity: his ego is inflated, he’s a narcissist, he’s abusive, he wants Janie as a trophy wife as well as a workhorse, and he’s jealous of Janie’s beauty and youth. The turning point in Janie and Jody’s marriage is when he insults her intelligence (40:00) and calls her old in the general store. Janie claps back by telling Jody, “when you pull down your britches you look like the change of life.” “The change of life” is an old-fashioned way of talking about menopause but in this case, Janie flips the scriipt on her male supremacist husband by using that term to talk about his genitalia, his lack of sexual prowess, and the fact that his equipment no longer works. She also points out that he has a big belly and we can see that something is going on with Jody’s health by his shaking hands which is why Janie rushes over to cut the tobacco. Joe Starks is a male supremacist until the very end as evidenced by his cursing of Janie on his deathbed. His dying is one of the best things that ever happened to Janie because she becomes independent and free for the first time in her life. Before she had Jody telling her what to do there was Logan telling her what to do, and before that her grandmother told her what to do. Janie can at long last decide what she wants to do for herself.
Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake is where she thinks she’s finally finds true, reciprocal love that fulfills all of her wants, her needs, and her desires. The townspeople of Eatonville are scandalized by Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship because they’re mired down in respectability politics (the belief that conforming to prescribed mainstream standards of appearance and behavior will protect Black people, Latinxs, Indigenous people, and other not-white people from systemic racism). They’re especially scandalized by the fact that Janie is twelve years older than Tea Cake but they don’t feel that way about an older man and a younger woman. Here we see Hurston flipping the scriipt on expected gender roles of the 1930s like she did in “The Gilded Six-Bits.” With Tea Cake Janie finds the kind of idealized love in middle age that she’s longed for since she was a teenager. The way she and Tea Cake love and laugh like teens scandalizes the townspeople even further.
Yet even with Tea Cake, Janie finds herself up against his toxic male ego. He steals her money for gambling, and insists on being the “man of the house” by supporting them economically even though Janie is a wealthy widow. Some may say that shows that Tea Cake truly loved her because he wasn’t interested in her money, but it’s also the reason that he insists on staying with the hurricane is coming (he doesn’t want to lose money by missing time in the fields). By the way, the hurricane in the novel is based on a real hurricane in 1928 that you can read about here if you’re interested: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl-1928-hurricane-story.html.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that Janie has unconditional love for Tea Cake. Unconditional love is enslaving love, and is most definitely to be avoided in all relationships. Unconditional love will have you thinking that you can be abused, mistreated, disrespected, lied to, stolen from, and taken for granted yet you’re still supposed to love the person. No unconditional love .
The film leaves out an important scene from the novel where Tea Cake smacks Janie in the face. He does this because he’s paranoid that Janie is going to leave him for a light-skinned man (although Tea Cake has light skin in the film, Hurston tells us in the novel that he’s dark skinned) so he smacks her to show everyone that he’s the boss of his marriage. The hurricane happens in the next chapter after Tea Cake smacks Janie: Hurston kills him off because he has to die after putting his hands on Janie and destroying their idealized love. The Everglades where they’re living at the time represents a kind of Garden of Eden that’s destroyed figuratively after Tea Cake hits Janie and shows his jealousy and literally by the hurricane and Janie killing him.
At the end of the story, Janie finds self-love, which is the best kind of love. Her quest for love is finally complete. She plunges herself into water to represent a cleansing of the past and a rebirth in that moment that will take her into her future.
