Faculty FrontDoor

Ms Tori Grajeda

Current Course list:

Summer 2015

Term A - ENC 1102 Online
Term B - Introduction to Film Online
Sign Up Now - ENG 2100
CRN 31807 (currently open)
CRN 32127 (currently full)


My educational background includes film studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, Latina/o studies, women's studies, and modern American poetry. For my degree, I explored the concept of "post-feminism" in relation to race in films and TV series such as Down With Love, The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, The Stepford Wives, What Women Want, and the Unit. My work on these "texts" investigates female identity and agency and female relationships across racial and ethnic lines between the revolutionary 1960s and post-War-on-Terror eras. The conclusion drawn is that the American society is "post" nothing until equality has been achieved in all senses of the term -- until we appreciate difference rather than try to smooth it out into a place where difference does not exist -- that, after all, pays no respect to equality in regards to our various ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

At Valencia, I teach Comp. I & II, American Lit. I, and Intro to Film. While learning strategies for accomplishing successful academic writing, my students engage in current issues and diverse worldviews. My courses ask students to discover themselves in relation to their world while learning how to position their voices in relation to other voices that shape the very same world differently, drawing distinct and divergent pictures of the people and practices that construct its shape, sound, & texture.

In my courses, I require students to think more broadly about the term "literature." Terry Eagleton argues that to define literature by a set of standards is to invoke power, power to determine whose voice matters and whose voice does not. In this way, categorizing any text as "literature" asserts the value one voice as more worthy of the label than another, or as Eagleton argues : "If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature' in England."