Black feminism

Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s The Time: Night is, for lack of a better phrase, a family novel in that it delves into familial relationships specifically regarding motherhood. Petrushevskaia explores three generations of women: The grandmother Sima, mother Anna, and daughter Alyona. Delving into manic hysteria, Anna’s situation portrays a cyclical view of history wherein Anna’s life repeats that of Sima; leaving us to assume that Alyona will also follow suit. Anna’s crazed view on motherhood and…

Contemporary artist, Tania Bruguera exemplifies what it means to use her social role to its full extent to bring awareness to issues in society. Bruguera is a “politically motivated performance artists” that analyzes society and its effects on political and economic power (Art21, 2017). In her well-known staged and participatory event called, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, Bruguera demonstrates authority and its repression throughout the performance (Figure 4). The performance included two policemen on…

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, and Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, frequently portrays gender roles with distinct characteristics throughout characters behavior in both stories. Morrison details the brief, yet painful perception of beauty, Pecola, who is affected by her parent's domestic violence, is discriminated by her community, connects with the prostitutes who are also considered ugly and abhorrent. Pecola tends to obtain the beauty standard and happiness through the blue eyes in…

Maggie A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York centers around a girl who deals with many issues. The story centers around Maggie, Jimmie, Mary, and Pete. Crane could have just called the story Maggie, but the full title is more fitting. A girl of the streets suggests she is a prostitute, and a story of New York tells us that Maggie’s environment may play a role in the story. There is constant tension in this environment that most children would be unable to thrive in. Maggie’s death can be…

Rosy cheeks and wide hips tied in tight, green cloth fill Aldous Huxley’s dystopian setting of A Brave New World. It is covered by a deep objectification of women-- causing sexuality and promiscuity to be cornerstones of Huxley’s carefully constructed society. When we compare Huxley’s world with our own, it gives valuable insight into the direction of this trend. Because of the changes to the family unit and increasing promiscuity, we find a harmful lack of intimacy growing in our society, a…

“Little Girls or Little Women? The Disney Effect” emphasize the stereotypes on little girls, as a Princess with beauty images and matureness. Introduction: How does Disney Princess become a huge effect by stereotypes toward little and older girl? For the reason, that many young and older girls believe that all Disney Princess dreams come true in reality than a fantasy fairy-tales and it is called “Princess Phenomenon” (pg. 509, Hanes). I have never fall for any Disney Princess’ character to…

Hook :“We are stronger in the places that we’ve been broken” (Hemingway). Explain Quote: Hemingway was broken by the many women of his life, however these experiences allowed him to become a stronger man. Tell about: Ernest Hemingway has been described as a “manly man” and used his masculinity not only to prove his personal qualities, but also to attract and impress the multiple women within his life. Tell about: The experiences and relationships he had with these women would go on to shape…

The aim of our production was to use Brechtian performance methods to highlight the issues of gender and power, drawing inspiration from ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ whilst using 1950’s gender tropes as a context. According to Elin Diamond (Diamond 1988) gender is made up of the ‘words, gestures appearances, ideas and behaviour that dominant culture understands as indices of feminine/masculine identity’. Our performance utilised gender normative elements to convey how these very…

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have produced groundbreaking work on maternity such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). By decentering the male scholarly gaze across a variety of disciplines, these feminists brought forth issues related to maternity such as its complex and ambivalent nature, the social “reproduction of mothering” from mother to daughter, and its political and patriarchal constructions. Critiques of essentialist and romanticized…

“‘Either you are a right good woman or else a right wicked woman’” (Kempe 83). Determining the exact label for Margery Kempe is debatable amongst scholars, as it was amongst her peers. While Kempe does exhibit convictions that can be found in “The Thirty-Seven Conclusions of the Lollards,” many scholars argue that Kempe’s beliefs were entirely orthodox. However, it is possible that Kempe was influenced by the radical preaching’s of the Lollards, and chose specific tenets in which to believe –…