A little respect

This story about the song “Respect” hits almost every theme we’ll discuss this semester in “Fluid Readers, Fluid Texts”: How and why does something come to be treated as a “text” in our culture? How do such factors as race, class, and gender enter into the equation? What’s “in” the text that doesn’t announce itself explicitly (and so must be discovered through “interpretation”)? How is the meaning of that text affected by its existence in multiple versions? By the identity of the “author” or the “reader”? How are both authors and readers shaped by culture? Where is the line between “identity” as an individual characteristic and a cultural artifact? And finally, what is “due” to each one of us by virtue of possessing an identity? What, in the end, is “respect,” and how do we show and get some?

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