Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads (.PDF)
File Size: 2.35 MB
Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads
Requirements: .PDF reader, 2.35 MB
Overview: Most contemporary discussions of sex differences assume that they are determined by society rather than biology. It is society that teaches little girls to be feminine and little boys to be masculine–society that tells women to respond to babies and men to respond to sports. Reflecting the fashionable idea that male and female roles have been “socially constructed,” most commentators speak of gender instead of sex.
“Ok’s métier in this lovely debut is an elegantly discursive, analytical style studded with ironies.”—David Woo, Literary Hub
“There are places,” Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, “where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed.”
In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.
Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
Free Download links: