<p>Day Two</p><p>Answer TWO of these 2-hour questions.</p><p>1. Trace the development of a homosexual identity. What is the origin of the homosexual according to Foucault? What role have social/political movements played in the consolidation of this identity category? Is “queer” a new identity category? Or does it signal a move away from identity politics?</p><p>2. Patricia Hill Collins popularized the notion of intersectionality to draw attention to the specific ways that black women experience gender oppression in America. Explain the historical importance of this idea to feminist theory. Describe specific empirical studies that draw on the concept of intersectionality. Finally, explain how the work of Paul Gilroy extends, complicates or critiques intersectional analysis.</p><p>3. Feminist theory has an uneasy relationship with biology. While second wave feminists minimized the importance of biology/embodiment for understanding gender inequality, more recently, there have been attempts to incorporate the body into our understanding of gender. Review the history of feminist engagement with biology. Explain your own perspective on the relationship between biological sex differences and gender inequality.</p><p>4. Choose four feminist theorists of color, and/or queer theorists and discuss their critique of sociology. How might their contributions compel the field to alter its epistemological practices?</p><p>5. How do Judith Butler, Peter Hennen, Judith Halberstam, and Jasbir Puar interrogate the performance of gender? What kinds of similarities and divergence do you find in their explanations of gender performance, and social change?</p><p>6. In his critique of psychological approaches to studying men and masculinity, Kobena Mercer argues that “[b]y emphasizing masculinity at the individual level of subjective interaction, rather than focus on men as a sociological group, the privileged attention to ‘sexuality’ is reductionist, as well as being ethnocentric by default”. Provide arguments for and against Mercer’s position. On balance, do you agree with Mercer’s assertion?</p>