Please respond to both questions below with at least 500 words. then

Please respond to both questions below with at least 500 words.

Then respond to at least 2 of your peers with comments containing a minimum of 150 words.

1. How do the selected readings use “intimacy” to challenge our ideas about private/public life?

2. How does Fatima Jamal and Caleb Luna prompt us to think about the relationship between power and desire?

here are more readings

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pQjey5Mmuw 

 https://www.them.us/story/jamal-lewis-new-documentary-celebrates-being-fat-black-and-trans 

 https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/how-to-be-fat-caleb-luna-sub/ 

first response 

From the article, the author points out that “Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness” ( Lauren Berlant 1998) just like the support we get from families and companies also friends. People tend to make intimate gestures such as hung and kiss even some subtle things under some circumstance when the people we care about are sad or depress. We can detect their emotions are different, it does not happen only between relatives sometime during the workplace and random monument when people feel vulnerable. Intimate in the both side, it can’t exist for one side. The bothe give and receive side feel each other the way they want. These emotions and gestures are uncontrollable, it could be anywhere and anytime. But also form the article “ the unavoidable troubles, the distractions, and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios”( Lauren Berlant 1998). It could be out of control sometimes, if when focus on the intimate might beyond just comfort, then some time will confuse us by thinking what really is. According to the article “private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the irrelevant”( Lauren Berlant 1998). That leads up to another problem, we may can control intimate emotion in public areas, but how should we think straight in private life? Since rules, we follow don’t have much meaning in private life. They getting more intense when people feeling it and in case people take action for it.

In the article, the author points out “ common-sense understandings of racial and sexual identity are re-presented and exploited toward related aims of material “survival,” commodity acquisition and consumption”(Jafari Sinclaire Allen 2007). It shows have the desire to work as an exchange for people trying to get a life, for that, people using whatever they can make worth for outside people with power to take. Underneath, not just things and the resource for countries, also soul of humans are victims on this system, for the example author mention about “ sex labor” we can clearly see that power can get whatever exist and desire come in the second step, these service design for power. From the article “Vacationers get to invert their everyday experiences while they consume experiences and bodies, the likes of which they would normally have restricted, or have no access at all” (Jafari Sinclaire Allen 2007). Power more become like privilege people hold to experience the thing they want to get from everywhere, desire didn’t show up in the public and living place, especially when people living with pressure and no power. Desire comes exactly power awakens. It connects each other, it made reach others, under the special occasion it explore together. Ar that time, “sex label” and the special service no longer about gender anymore.it comes up with more things to give, thus power and desire twist together.

second 

This week’s reading is particularly interesting and thought-provoking. Particularly, in the article, “Fatima Jamai’s new Documentary Celebrates Being Fat, Black and Trans”, I realized the harsh restriction and prejudice that the society has posted on women, especially for the black women. As the article indicates, we are taught the specific way to treat different people and have a very fixed beauty standard that we usually use to select the desirable and undesirable people. The article reminds me of the dominant beauty standard that our current society has. In China, we also have a very standardized and universal beauty standard that a lot of us, including me, tend to use to differentiate people: who is the pretty one and who is not. Additionally, excessive power is granted to people who are socially viewed as pretty. As mentions in Mitchell Hobbs’ article, “Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy”, the online intimacy and relationships are largely relied on the physical appearance that individuals post on their social accounts, “as many strangers begin a conversation based solely on physical attraction and subsequently engage in the strategic ‘presentation of self’ to convey a desirable impression” (282). This beauty standard is so strict and deeply entrenched that it powerfully alters individuals’ attitudes towards others. Hence these set of unwritten beauty standard forcefully set the public with a fixed mode, expecting everyone to follow. For example, in China, one that is skinny, white and tall is normally regarded as beautiful and worth respect. 

After reading this week’s article, I realized that the social stereotype on beauty standard oppresses people and restricts people to do whatever they want to do with their own body, as well as the prevalence of intersectional prejudice in current society. It occurs to me that the African American females are more likely to confront double or even triple oppressions from the current society, which I have not thought before. Particularly,I studied ablism, ageism, sexism, singlism, racism, and so on, but I failed to realize that they might actually combine into one repression that are currently hurting and torturing some groups of people. These repression, discrimination and injustice are so real and cruel that people are suffering and dying for their race, sex, gender identity and so forth that are not consistent with the traditional social stereotypes. For marginalized people who are, standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, we need to take more actions and protection for them. In our daily life of fighting against of oppressions from social norms, they might be ignored or left behind, as some prejudice might overlap others: people fight for racism might have sexism or ageism. For the African American females, who has already faced a lot of repression for being women. With this specific constraint, they are treated even more unfair because of their race. If they are still unable to follow the mainstream of beauty standard, they might be oppressed even more seriously. To comprehensively fighting against these social injustice, what we should do from now on is to think broadly and more inclusively.