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Week Four
Blog Assignment

This week, we capped off our first full unit by beginning a discussion around how gender and power function in everyday life. We became especially interested in understanding the concept of “the everyday.� According to Henry Lefebvre, the everyday constitutes the ordinary, the mundane, or the day-to-day lived reality of people. It is something that we all hold claim to, but which we all experience differently; indeed, “the everyday� is what the unique inner-workings of gender and power produce in our lives. Just as no one experiences gender and power in quite the same way, no way experiences the everyday in the same way. It is for this reason that “the everyday� can become a powerful resource for understanding how/why people perform gender the way they do and in response to certain factors.

In Cusp, we are introduced to Alice, a girl on the brink of adolescence. We watch her in her day-to-day life, as she begins to realize how gender and power function differently in this new, almost adult, age, versus how things were when she was a child. In turn, we get a very interesting depiction of a subject who is responding- often through gender- to powers she’s only encountering for the first time. If we contemplate Alice’s “everyday� life, what observations might we make about gender and power? How are these observations specific to Alice’s life? In what ways is Alice’s frustration resulting from a confrontation with “limits� of power that take away certain possibilities for her self-expression? In a 250-300 word blog, explore these questions, making sure to draw specific references from the film to support your claims.