Write an essay of about 3000 words (10-12 typed, double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. Please remember that these are suggested topics only, and that you need to narrow and refine your argument; think carefully about exactly what idea or thesis you want to present in your work. Although this is not necessarily a research paper, I will expect you to do an adequate amount of background reading, and to demonstrate some familiarity or fluency in the theoretical material we have been discussing in class. The main direction that most of these topics suggest involves what Stuart Hall calls "applied theory": making connections between theory and practice, or between culture and cultural critique. Please use the current MLA format for documentation. Due in class on Monday, November 27.

1. "The construction of stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability. Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines" (Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble, Norton 2494) Mindful of critical claims such as those made by Butler, here and elsewhere, investigate the writing of the body. What constitutes and / or disrupts those surfaces? How? How are sexual and graphic (writing) "practices" interrelated? What does writing the body look or sound or feel like?

2. Theorize the production or creation of space. What is the relationship among such concepts as space, place, position and location? Howe might such concepts be critically useful? How is the spatial linked to the articulation of race or of class or of gender or sexuality? How exactly are the notions of the public and the private foregrounded and potentially put into question by/in lived spaces?

3. Dick Hebdige focuses on what he calls subcultural style. With reference to some specific counter-cultural or alternative cultural practice, discuss the idea of voice. How are questions of style and subjectivity linked to the description of voices, of having a voice? What exactly constitutes vox populi, the "voice of the people"? How is culture -- or subculture, or popular culture -- enmeshed in modes of public address, or of being heard?

4. Theorize performance. How is performance related to language? Is performativity always linked to physical or material performance? To theatricality? What are the differences between speaking and doing? Does praxis necessarily entail certain kinds of embodiment? How corporeality -- put at issue in the popular sphere?

5. Gayatri Spivak notes that there are two distinct meanings of the word "representation": the first, Darstellung in German, refers to portrature, to representations of someone or something, while the second, Vertretung in German, refers to representations for someone or something, to standing in or proxy (as in representational government). Investigate the nature and practice of representation in a specific context. What is the politics of the image? Of celebrity, for example? How do these two senses of representation collide?

6. Present an overview of the career of one of the cultural theorists on the course syllabus. How does his or her work develop or change? What are the blind spots and preoccupations that characterize this work? In what ways do some of these thinkers blur the boundaries between theory and writing? Between criticism and poetry? How do you read theoretical work as writing?

7. Discuss the connection between pedagogy and critical theory. How and what does theory claim to teach us? What sort of teaching or learning is enabled by theory? What is its rhetoric? Its discipline? How can theory effectively be taught -- even in courses such as this one? What epistemologies are at stake here? What constitutes critical knowledge or knowing?

8. A project of your own devising. Please consult with me before you begin to write.