Blogs 1-3 (David Lohrberg)

Blog 1: Modifiers

There are different types of modifiers. The word ‘different’ in the previous sentence, for example, is an adjective modifying the object of the sentence. Remarkably, I could leave out ‘different’ in the first sentence of this blog, since modifiers are optional grammatical elements. Likewise, I could omit ‘remarkably’ from the sentence I used to characterize grammatical modifiers. Explaining which sentence I was referring to in the previous sentence, I used a relative clause as modifier.

Blog 2: Parellelism

Parallel structures create flow and rhythm. Consequently, repeating grammatical structures, sounds, meanings or meter can be very persuasive. Therefore, politicians like to use parallelisms:

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I will learn.”              

(Benjamin Franklin)  

"We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interest, and teach us what it means to be citizens."
(George W. Bush)

Blog 3: MLA Citation

Judith Butler’s distinction between sex and gender is helpful to understand how the latter is socially and mentally constructed:

To be female is (…) a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have to become a woman, to compel the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. (Butler 522)

According to Butler, gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Butler 519) In this view, gender is not a natural category, but a socially and culturally constructed mental concept reinforced by performative acts of the body that are continuously repeated and reenacted. Since “gender is an act which has been rehearsed” (Butler 526), the performance of these acts follows a script. This script can be interpreted differently, but it simultaneously confines and enables the performance (Ibid.)

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and      Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31.