Some interesting stuff from my anthro classes

I've written a couple of interesting papers in the last couple of weeks -- and by "in the last couple of weeks," I of course mean, "I had the prompts for a couple of weeks but the actual paper writing was accomplished as a three-day, fifteen-page marathon."

The first was for Gender and Archaeology -- which, side note, I honestly thought I disliked this professor?  I'd taken an Intro to Archaeology with her and been avoiding her ever since.  But she's wonderful.  Anyway.  The paper is about the recent trend in anthropology (of which archaeology is a sub-discipline) of dedicating some time to describing the cultural context from which the writer is approaching the subject.  Until quite recently (the late 70s/early 80s, from what I can tell) this was considered both unscholarly and unscientific, but the trouble there?  The only way we look at a scientific perspective and say "this is objective" is if it's at least a passable imitation of being from a white middle-class Anglo-European male.  Think about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings a few years back -- remember how everyone thought she would be biased because she was a Hispanic woman?  Remember how no one ever said "Well, being a white male should by that logic be an equal bias in the opposite direction?"  See what I mean?  The same is true of the social sciences.  Work that isn't from a white Euro-American male is peripheral.  You can't just be an archaeologist, you're a woman archaeologist or a Filipina archaeologist or a Chinese archaeologist.

So I argued that the centralizing of the observer as a part of the narrative forges a new objectivity.  I called the paper "Through Scientific I's."  Oh, the pun of it.

The other paper was for Language and Culture and it was about transmodal stylization and appropriation of homosexual group identity in the linguistic construction of the self, which is linguistics jargon for "why gay men talk that way."  I studied a couple of gay characters played by openly gay white American actors -- Chris Colfer's Kurt in Glee and John Barrowman's Jack in Torchwood -- and analyzed how the use of stereotypical gay speech is important for negotiating multiple identities.

So that was fun.  And now I go sleep.