Gender 300 writing assignments:

12-page research paper (due April 27)
This paper is worth 25% of your final grade for this course and therefore it should be your best effort! You can select any topic you like that is relevant to our course materials - a film, a short story, a poem (or a group of poems), a painting (or a group of paintings), a certain theme, or a cultural issue that we already discussed or just touched upon in our course. Your research paper is a piece of analytical (expository) writing in which you must use secondary material (criticism), with no less than four sources (books or articles). Also, you have to attach an annotated bibliography that is compiled according to the standards of your major field (MLA, for example). You can access the Writing Center handouts regarding annotated bibliographies and other aspects at: http://www.lclark.edu/~writing/handouts/handout_frame.htm

Don't forget to make your appointment with the Writing Center as early as possible because it is usually very busy at the end of the semester: http://www.lclark.edu/~writing/

Paper Proposal Due: March 23 (Friday)
(1-2 pages, including your bibliography)

Select a topic for your paper. The subject of your paper could be any aspect at the intersection of gender studies and artistic expression, as found in one or more literary text/s, visual arts or cinema. You can also research a specific gender issue, recurrent image/s, and symbol/s in two or more artistic genres. Discuss your topic with your instructor, peers, or librarians. Go to the library; look for source materials (gender/art books' indexes, gender studies handbooks, etc. can be a good source for topic discovery). Remember that your topic has to be interesting! Be sure that it is appropriately narrow and promising, and can be researched within the time limit.

After doing your preliminary research on the topic, try to come up with a focus (or a thesis statement) for your paper. Write a paragraph in which you provide a basic background for your topic and make your thesis statement.

Write a basic plan for your final essay (this plan can be expressed in the form of questions you would like to answer in your paper, or in the form of some short statements (you may use complete or incomplete sentences for this purpose). The plan (outline) has to reflect the logical progression of your argument by which you try to prove the validity of your thesis statement.

Write a preliminary bibliography. List all your primary sources first (novels, short stories, films, or paintings, etc.), and after that list your secondary sources (criticism, film or exhibit reviews). Use only scholarly resources from published books and articles (you could use "google for scholars," as it mostly provide articles from scholarly journals). Be very conscious about the Internet resources many of which are of very low quality… I suggest that you find at least four secondary sources on your topic. Use LC interlibrary loan service, if you find that our library doesn't have enough material on your topic (start to search for your bibliography early!!!)

Composition of your research paper proposal:

Your name
Tentative title of your paper
Your thesis statement or a brief description of your paper
(one or two paragraphs)
Your basic outline of the paper
Preliminary bibliography (three or four sources for now)

Five small analytical essays (optional)
Instead of a final exam (25% of your grade for this course), you have the choice of writing five small analytical essays (2-3 pages each) that are more or less evenly spread throughout the semester and that consist of your critical responses to our class reading or viewing assignments. These essays have to be typed, dated and submitted at the end of the class during which the assigned material is discussed. As we cover three major art forms in this course (literature, painting and film), I expect you to write at least one essay per artistic mode, and to always approach your subject from a gender perspective. Please take our theoretical/critical readings seriously, as they will certainly assist you in learning the technique of gender analysis. Some samples of analytical essay writing will be posted on this web page as soon as they become available.

Six-page analytical essay (due February 27)
For your essay topic, select any artistic material we have discussed (or touched upon) in our course up to this time (a painting, a short story, a poem, etc.) and reflect on how gender is relevant to it. You can explore gender issues expressed in the material, analyze images of men or women in it or evaluate its aesthetic and/or political meaning. Your essay is worth 15% of your final grade for this course and you are expected to present your argument in a convincing and eloquent way. While you don't have to use secondary material (criticism) for this assignment, you are expected to utilize a gender perspective or theory that we discussed in this course.

The following are some tips for writing such an analytical essay.

1. In your introduction you need to explain what your major claim or focus is ( your essay's title also reflects your focus in some way)
2. Support your claim or thesis with specific evidence from the primary "text/s" (I consider a film or a painting also a primary cultural "text," just like a story or a poem).
3. A strong essay provides and analyzes numerous examples to show what you are talking about. (Telling is not enough.)
4. A conclusion does more than restate your major claim; it summarizes and braids together different strands of your argument.