Michelle, I'm glad they liked SLOW RIVER. I'd love to hear more about some
of the student presentations--either here or in private email.
With regard to the cheery, "everything is getting better" attitude of your
students: I have mixed feelings. After all, if one is speaking of gender
inequity in this particular culture, everything *is* getting better. It
still has a long, long way to go, of course. But maybe you could ask them to
put themselves in the shoes of, say, a modern American woman who goes to
Saudi Arabia and finds she can't drive, vote, etc. etc; ask them to imagine
they are stuck there forever, and imagine how angry they'd be. You could
speak about the purpose, the use of anger; a tool for change, all that stuff.
Maybe you could do a class role-playing thing: divide the class into brown
eyes and blue eyes, and only take questions from/listen to/applaud the
contributions of the brown-eyed contingent and see how they feel after
*that*.
I don't know what to suggest for the puritans except to ask: what are they
afraid of? Maybe they just don't like raw emotion. Find some passages on
ecstatic food eating or something, or childbirth, and see how they compare it
to writing on sex.
The subject of religion: are you saying the class wouldn't even discuss
homosexuality, or that they wouldn't discuss the Morman's reaction to it?
Nicola
Nicola Griffith
http://www.america.net/~daves/ng/
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