Common Curriculum
"I'm Not a Woman, I'm Not a Man"
Honors Writing:
My love for Prince and his music began with the Purple Rain tape my mom played on repeat in our ancient Buick Park Avenue. It was only later in life that I began to relate to his androgynous, and at times feminine, musical persona. Using primary research, I develop my theory on Prince’s androgyny in this first piece. Read below the introduction to this piece or click the link to view the full piece.
“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man”: The Effect of Prince’s Music, Voice, and Dress on Views of His Gender and Sexuality
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Prince was a straight man who became a queer icon. The 1980s were a time of glamour, and Prince carried every bit of it. From the lyrics he wrote, to the falsetto he sang in, and the clothes he wore, Prince oozed sexuality and androgyny. In the present article, I will look at four specific songs– “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “I Would Die 4 U,” “Controversy,” and “Diamonds and Pearls”– and how the lyrics and performance of these songs contributed to Prince’s androgynous persona. At a time when Prince’s contemporaries, like Michael Jackson or Def Leppard, dressed for hyper-masculinity, Prince took the opposite approach. His androgyny was part of his sex appeal, and it was found throughout his lyrics and performance.
In “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” Prince’s androgyny is obvious even in the title. Simon Reynolds claims the song is “the plaint of a man whose yearning to get close to his female lover is so intense that he’s come to feel that his own gender is a barrier to ultimate intimacy.” If only he could become one of his lover’s girlfriends, he could feel intimacy with her. The narrator wishes to wash his girlfriend’s hair, pick out her clothes, and go to a movie and cry together. In “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” the love between two women as friends is comparable to the intimate romantic relationship between a man and a woman. According to Reynolds, this shows Prince borders on the fantasy of being a lesbian.
The Nymphéas
Honors Seminar:
The first time I ever saw a Claude Monet painting, I fell in love with impressionism. At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, I was only seven, but even as a child I was able to recognize the instinctual beauty of Monet’s Water Lilies. This second piece is an exploration of the emotions and feelings that surround the things we find beautiful and the connections we make to them, as well as an exploration of my own aesthetic preferences. Read below the introduction to this piece or click the link to read the full piece.
The Nymphéas
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The North Carolina Museum of Art exposed me to my first in-person Claude Monet painting. I was small and the water lilies were large, so I held my mother’s hand to ground myself. I was seven, but I wanted a poster of that one, the water lilies.
Having completely forgotten about this event when I went to Paris for the first time, I couldn’t understand why, when I stepped into the Musée de l’Orangerie, it felt like stepping into the past. The Nymphéas, a series of eight, large panels of water lilies, swept me into a feeling of nostalgia, brought on by the association of one beautiful experience with another. I felt like I had teleported straight into Monet’s garden.
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Why do I love them? First, there is Paris, a Mecca of art, culture, literature, and music. The act of being in Paris is enough to make the heart flutter. Then there is the river Seine, with its two famous islands, Île de la Cité and its little brother, Île Saint-Louis. Move North-East to find the Jardin des Tuileries, most famous for being the location of the Louvre, but also where you can take the long gravel incline up to the Musée de l’Orangerie. Though originally built, as the name suggests, to house orange trees, the building was converted into a museum after World War I.