Femininity

Perception of Gender Roles A common question concerns what male and female roles in society are and if there is an in-between. In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe explains the many challenges Okonkwo, a very honorable member from the Umuofia clan, faces with himself about cognitive dissonance. This Nigerian clan constantly revolves life around a deliberate gender role system. Okonkwo dedicates his life to always being masculine due to the fear of becoming a failure like his father Unoka, who did…

(2015, p. 48) theorized that although San was coded as feminine, she had displayed the characteristics of a barbaric and uncontrolled femininity of nature, a femininity that was out of the cultural system and must be controlled properly. San was depicted as the forest princess even though she was not a spirit of the forest. San’s strong independence and strength cast a boundary between her and human…

gun but the actual gun itself. In an excerpt from Rich’s book Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson the split between being an object and an active, willing human person is made evident. The struggle between the two conflicting ideas of femininity and masculinity are mirrored by the split. The gun presents the speaker as the combination of characteristics that are not usually attributed to a “woman”. “Cruel not pleasant, hard not soft, emphatic not weak, one who kills not one who…

on women writers” (Helal 78). Although the woman in the poem is manipulating a man rather than monologues or markets, it is not hard to believe that Parker would be doing the same to a man. Dorothy Parker “publicly performed a highly stylized femininity, [but] textually she aspired…

Belles’ influence makes the beast “worthy of society” as she takes his rough masculine edges and smooth’s them over by adding a touch of femininity, to make a balanced person. This displays the basic societal stereotype of a man in a rut, who then meets some woman that “fixes” the man, in turn together (gradually) they are able to help each other reach emotional stability, worthy of empathy…

Societal and psychological perceptions of gender and beauty greatly affect women because they marginalize women’s identities and who they are as individuals. These preconceived societal and cultural perceptions of women disregard them as individuals with their own experiences, ideals and beliefs, education, self-worth, sexuality, etc. They demonstrate how women are viewed in society as well as how they are “expected” to behavior and how they should look; as a result, when a woman goes against…

As we have learned throughout the course, intersectionality affects our experiences within our social category. Intersectionality can either give us privilege or reduce privilege depending on which categories we fall into. Each individual’s personal experience in a situation will differ due to intersectionality. In Heather Kuttai’s “Maternity Rolls”, we see how her experience with disability is shaped by her gender, and vice-versa. Although Kuttai does mention that being feminine was important…

1. Ladies in Lines follows a group of women as they’re trained for the armed forces and follows their struggles and achievements. Normally we would associate the armed forces with men but with Ladies in Lines we see and learn that women can be trained up for the armed forces just like men are. Women are usually seen as being innocent and so at first we wouldn’t expect the women in Ladies in Lines to be able to cope with their new environment in the training centre. However, Ladies in Lines…

Women compose a fundamental component of society that is equally significant in comparison to men, as both genders depend on each other in order to achieve certain aspects in life. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, women are not equally present as men, since their presence exemplifies either extreme wickedness or moral decency. Thus, Shakespeare uses female characters such as Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff in the play to represent the struggle between good and evil by examining elements like…

This is Lady Macbeth rejecting her femininity to go into masculinity. We can see Lady Macbeth demonstrate masculinity when she says “O, never/ Shall sun that morrow see!/ Your face, my thane, is as a book where men/ May read strange matters. To beguile the time,/ Look like the time. Bear welcome…