Carrie Bradshaw & Judith Butler

For the Sex and the City group presentation, I was mainly in charge of analyzing the handout by Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and relating it to our primary text. I came up with three questions relating Butler to Sex and the City through topics such as gender identity and construction. I was also appointed to research the main character, Carrie Bradshaw, and create a character analysis as well as questions about her that would facilitate group discussion. I utilized Butler’s paper to psychoanalyze Carrie and put her in a cultural perspective relating to our course’s theme of radicalism. Each of our group members came together on several occasions to brainstorm and come up with ideas for our presentation. In these meetings we decided who would do which part and how the presentation would be organized. I also helped in formatting and printing out copies for the class of the quiz, “Which Sex and the City character are you?” and I helped in preparing the virgin apple martinis and cosmopolitans for the class to enjoy. During the presentation, I worked with the group that identified with “Carrie” and I tried to give them a sense of her complex character in the time allotted. I also tried to facilitate discussion by passing out different questions to different students and having them collaborate for their answers, expressing my ideas as well. During the presentation I reminded my groupmates to bring the discussion when it went on a tangent, back into focusing on the theoretical questions we had come up with.

Taboos in Space

(Please focus on the first minute of this clip).
In this clip from “Sex and the City,” we see Samantha, the middle aged successful businesswoman with her boyfriend/model Smith, who is a good twenty years younger than her walking down the street in the daytime in the city. Although they have been in a long-term, monogamous relationship, Samantha is afraid to hold Smith’s hand in public, amplifying the role of place in the behavior between humans. As Barker explains in the section, “Space and Place in Contemporary Theory,” spaces are divided to encompass different definitions for social interactions (374). For example, someone’s dining room in their house is known as an intimate space where people can act however they like, whereas the restaurant is a public place where people abide by specific social rules. We can employ “Goffman’s (1969) concepts of ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions,” to relate this video clip to cultural theory (Barker 374). Samantha and Smith are in front space, as if they’re on a stage with other city people as their audience. When they’re at home or with a group of friends, those spaces are the “back” in that they are figuratively “behind the scenes” (374). Culture defines what is appropriate for the front and back regions of space, and it is evident through this clip that the culture these elite socialites inhabit may not be accepting of their massive age gap. This clip pokes fun at the presumed absurdity of this idea by causing Samantha to break her toe in avoidance of the taboo act.