Blog Post #7

I think that all of the presentations were done well and everybody seemed to know what they were talking abut. The two topics that stuck out to me were the Queer theory and African American Criticism because both of these topics were already well-known to some extent.
The Queer theory group showed movie clips which helped explain their theory. First, Brokeback Mountain showed the double-consciousness of two gay cowboys and how they live in two different worlds that are always conflicting with each other. Then they showed a clip from Scary Movie 4 that made fun of Brokeback Mountain. This shows how society still cannot completely accept homosexuality. The group also talked about the superstructure and the foundation of society and explained that the "other" is a term used for gay people as the unimportant people. Binary opposition is when privileged people are compared to the "others" like straight/gay.
The group that talked about African American Criticism was also good. I never realized that there many similarities between this theory and Queer theory. They both use the "other" and binary opposition to show how gays and African Americans are discriminated against. The group analysed the story "Battle Royal" by Ralph Ellison who was an African American critic who wrote about the struggles that his people had to face through history. In all, I believe that all of the presentations were well done and it seemed like everybody did their part.