In this paper, you will synthesize course materials about the butch and fem tough bar lesbians of the 1950s and the queens of the 1960s to describe queer life in the mid-twentieth century United States before the Stonewall Riots.
Your assignment: Think like an anthropologist who is describing the most important features of “the gay world†in the U.S. in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s to people who have never been exposed to these lives and cultures.
- Who does “the gay world†include? What are they like? What do they call themselves?
- Where do people live and work? How and where do people socialize?
- How is the gay world organized by socioeconomic class? Gender? Race?
- What are other internal hierarchies?
- How are same-sex desiring and gender creative people treated by straight society?
Your observations need to be drawn from Mother Camp, “Screaming Queens,†and Boots of Leather to describe similarities and differences between the lives, cultures, and worlds of the queens and the tough bar lesbians.
You also must:
- Use accurate time- and place-specific terminology to describe sex, gender, and sexuality;
- Demonstrate that you have read and watched all of the relevant materials
- Provide correct page numbers from Mother Camp and Boots of Leather in your in-text citations (when applicable).
- A heading with your name, the date, and ANTH 3047W;
- An appropriate title
- An introduction
- A main argument in the first paragraph of your assignment
- Topic sentences that support the main argument and reflect the content of the paragraph
- Transitions between paragraphs, when appropriate
- A conclusion that reviews the content of your essay
- Proper in-text citations using the Chicago Manual of Style
- Evidence that you copyedited for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors by containing few of these errors
- The following formatting: Times New Roman font, 1†margins, double-spaced text, no breaks (small spaces) between paragraphs, an indentation at the beginning of each new paragraph.
