TEXTS
O Hartman, Saidiya. ‘The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous
Manner.” Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. xiv-403
O Tolentino, Jia. “Always be Optimizing.” Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Random
House, 2019, pp. 63-94.
O Giridharadas, Anand, “The Critic and the Thought Leader,” in Winners Take All: The Elite
Charade of Changing the World, Vintage, 2019.
PROMPT
Giridharadas, Tolentino, and Hartman all share an interest in how larger institutions attempt to influence and control individual lives. Giridharadas examines the role of the thought leader in shaping public opinion and suggests that thought leaders tend to promote easy fixes that do nothing to address larger structural issues like sexism and inequality. Tolentino argues that feminism has evolved to work within a capitalist economy, which has created pressure for women to “always be optimizing” as they chase after the goal of becoming the ideal woman. And Hartman uses the example of Esther Brown to demonstrate how the police, in collaboration with the state, subjected Black women living in Harlem in the early 1900s to surveillance and discipline, forcing them to find new ways of living.
However, while each of the authors broadly argue that it will always be in the best interests of those in power to maintain the status quo, they also begin to suggest ways that individuals can challenge that authority. In this paper, I’d like you to think about how much power individuals have to resist the influence of social institutions.
Citing evidence from all three essays, respond to the following question: In what ways do individual acts of resistance threaten the authority of the status quo?
Make sure you use 3 sources mentioned in attachment.