Carnal Knowledge and Screw Yer Roommate
Excuse me for being pretentious but this is really exciting. So my suite mate Clara mentioned to me that for this annual event at Rice where you find a blind date for your roommate and make them both dress up as something and embarrassingly go to dinner, people are vigorously advertising their roommates with elaborate descriptions, many of which were encoded with race-and-exoticism- heavy language. What does KC mean by that? Well, we recently read Ann Laura Stoler's chapter on "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and Morality in the Making of Race" for my Sexual Debates in the U.S. class. How race, gender, and sexuality were managed and constructed were crucial to upholding imperialism. And now, race and exoticism are crucial to how we participate in this event where we actively find the perfect match. And this is where it gets juicy. If a person was not Caucasian, their heritage was mentioned quite often. And sometimes, their ethnicity became a point of discussio...