Beth Loffreda, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics
in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder and:
For more assignment ideas involving this essay,
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Loffreda and Gladwell: Applying Social Theory to
an Individual Case
For your fourth assignment I would like you to make an argument about
the way that Loffreda's account complicates Gladwell's thinking on the
subject of social change. In other words, the question assumes that
the events surrounding the death of Matt Shepherd can be explained using
the terms that Gladwell employs–stickiness, the Law of the Few, the
Broken Windows Theory–and so on. But I do not want you simply to
use Gladwell's essay as a way of interpreting Loffreda's. I also want
you to consider the larger implications. What does Loffreda's essay show
that Gladwell has failed to consider or to think through completely? Gladwell
could be correct in many respects, but he still may have overlooked certain
features of social life. What might Gladwell learn from a reading of Loffreda?
A "C" paper will apply Gladwell's terms to Loffreda's text in
a clear, competent, and accurate way. A "B" paper will develop
the discussion of "complications" more extensively. An "A"
paper will explore original and thought-provoking complications while
doing everything that the "C" and "B" papers do as
well.
At this point in the semester your paper should include the following:
1. An introductory paragraph that (a) presents the problem, question,
or context that your essay responds to; (b) identifies the authors under
discussion and their works; (c) gives your readers a statement of the
argument you will make or the question you will pose
2. A coherent, well-developed argument that draws on textual evidence
to support its claims. Textual evidence should be selected carefully and
interpreted in order to guide the reader toward your conclusions.
3. Wherever appropriate, textual evidence that makes connections between
the authors
4. Well-organized paragraphs that present a unifying main idea through
explanation and illustration. Ideally, the first or second sentence of
each paragraph should identify the main idea.
5. Clear, grammatically correct prose.
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Tensions between the Public, the Private, and the Personal (Assignment 6)
Both Susan Faludi and Beth Loffreda describe situations that could be considered tipping points: situations that challenged accepted stereotypes of male identity, that resulted in violence, that were taken up by the media, and that became the catalyst for greater public awareness of the issues of women’s equal opportunity, and gay rights, respectively.
In this essay, you are asked to examine the parallels between The Citadel and the world of Laramie, Wyoming, using Gladwell’s theory of social change. Note the key people, messages and situational cues at work. Consider the following:
- What are the parallels between Matt Shepard and Shannon Faulkner?
- How did the media act as a tipping point in each case?
- Which situational factors led to violence?
- How did female and gay identities go against accepted norms of “male” identity? How did stereotypes function to challenge and maintain identities?
- How are larger social tensions reflected in these episodes?
Laura Smith, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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Reconciliation (Assignment 3)
Context:
- The “Us. vs. Them” or “I vs. You” antagonism that we have studied in Thurman and Tannen rears perhaps its ugliest head in Beth Lofredda’s study of Matt Shepard’s murder in Laramie.
- Both Tannen and Lofredda express disappointment in their academic colleagues, both for what they do and what they fail to do. The academic establishment may illustrate, for them, Abba Eban’s famous quip about groups that never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
- The core purpose of “reconciliation” as it was conceived in post-apartheid South Africa was to halt the cycle of violence and allow both victim and victimizer to get on with the business of making human life better.
Assignment Question: Can Tannen and Thurman help us understand the causes of homophobia and its violent expression? Can this understanding provide any guidelines for reconciliation between gay and homophobic Americans, “to break the cycle of violence and get on with the business of making life better”?
Questions to Prime the Pump:
- What are the roles of fear, anger, sadness, vilification, and untruth in Lofredda? In Thurman? In Tannen?
- What are the consequences of “dehumanizing” the “other,” as Lofredda suggests that Henderson, McKinney, and some CSU students did? What happens when the second “I” (in Thurman’s “I vs. I”) becomes nonhuman, invisible, nothing?
- When Lofredda looks at the response in Laramie in the first days after the attack, she identifies the widespread reaction of “outrage” among some but the relatively limited commitment to the “hard, slow work of social justice” (437). How would Tannen and Thurman explain these responses? How would you explain their roles in reconciliation?
- What is the difference between what Thurman describes as the “relative self” and what Lofredda describes as the “dehumanized” self of the Other?
Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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Reconciliation (Assignment 4)
Context:
- Both Matt Shepard and the women of Iran faced oppressors who sought to obliterate them; however, we meet the women as they struggle to survive in “two worlds” and Matt only after he no longer survives in any world. Most of Matt’s glbtq community, however, lives to struggle on.
- Nafisi writes of the “two photographs” as emblems of the “two worlds” the women lived in. “The second photograph belonged to the world inside the living room. But outside, underneath the window that deceptively showcased only the mountains and the tree outside our house, was the other world, where the bad witches and furies were waiting to transform us into the hooded creatures of the first” (24).
- In your last essay, you looked at the causes of prejudice and oppression, and you may find that many of them, including but not limited to religiosity (not to be confused with religion or spirituality), ignorance, and jealously guarded, insecure power, will also apply to the revolutionary regime of Iran. In this essay, you will look not at the sources of oppression in the victimizers but at the means of surviving and perhaps thriving under oppression in the victims.
Assignment Question: What can the experiences of the glbtq community in Laramie and Nafisi’s students in Tehran tell us about the resources oppressed people can use to survive and perhaps overcome their ordeals?
Questions to Prime the Pump:
- Nafisi clearly believes that art, literature, imagination, color and dreams figure in the women of Iran’s survival skills. Are those things relevant to the communities in Laramie?
- Did all of Nafisi’s students truly live in “just” two worlds?
- What complicates the “two photograph/two worlds” theory?
- What role did community play among the survivors of Laramie and the survivors of Tehran? Is the act of forming community in itself an act of reconciliation?
- What is the relationship between Sheherazade who “breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement [. . . and] fashions her universe not through physical force [. . . ] but through imagination and reflection” (19) and the literature class in Tehran? Are imagination and reflection “players” in the university community in Laramie?
- What are we to make of Nafisi’s apparent endorsement of lying (17) if reconciliation is indeed predicated upon truth? And what of the versions of the “truth” that came from the journalists in Laramie?
- Are some differences “irreconcilable”? If Nafisi’s students cannot or should not seek reconciliation with the regime, then of what sort of reconciliation is Nabokov’s art meant to facilitate? Was Matt’s life irreconcilable with a homophobic community?
Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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