Teresa Austin ENGL 151C Maria Brandon April 11, 2011 ESSAY 4 Alice Walker Alice Walker is an advocate/activist for the end of ignorance to the persecution of her gender and race. Alice Walker’s life relates to her stories, poems and plays, they represent a mirrored image of her life growing up a poor, oppressed, black daughter of sharecroppers. Walker’s writings are a voice for the injustice of prejudice and oppression of black women and their culture. In the summer of 1952 while playing cowboys and Indians with her brothers, Alice was blinded in her right eye from an accidental gunshot wound at the young age of eight. When she was 14 years old her brother Bill had the "cataract" removed for Alice by a doctor in
So, it would be interesting to explore how Walker uses this blackness to her advantage. Even the very title of Walker’s essay “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View,” intimates that she goes beyond being a mere Hurston enthusiast, she’s a fervent supporter. The word partisan indicates more. For example, it can also be taken to mean Walker is aligning herself to Hurston in terms of being female, a writer, but also, a sister in blackness. Hurston had this to say in Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook: I dislike insincerity, and most particularly when it vaunts itself to cover up cowardice.
Essay #2 (Women Who Live Evil Lives by Martha Few and Autobiography of a Slave by Juan Francisco Manzano) In the book Women Who Live Evil Lives by Martha Few, Few makes the argument that despite the vast ethnic and gender discrimination that plagued Santiago de Guatemala during the time of the Spanish inquisition, women especially women of color were able to exercise more cultural authority then historians have previously acknowledged. Her analysis of the perspective of the “mujeres de mal vivir” or “the women who live evil lives” tells us the often overlooked story of women who to use Few’s words, “drew on ideas and practices of religion and the supernatural and reformulated them to assert their authority and power in the local community”(5). She goes on to say that “Women then used this authority and power to overtly challenge gender, racial and colonial hierarchies and intervene in conflicts and problems in daily life”(5). This new found perspective for examination allows us a better understanding of the hierarchical aspects of both the culture at large as well as the slave culture. Within both of the cultures, societal role was often determined by ethnicity as well as gender and Few points out that the perspective of historians has always been shaped by the assumption that this discrimination led to the utter oppression of those in marginalized groups.
Other novels I read include The Dead by James Joyce and Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, both of which addressed the theme of materialism and wealth as factors to being regarded highly in society, and how this way of functioning in society leads people away from living a true and happy life. These novels were written decades ago. One would think that with these societal problems being recognized for so long, we would have made more progress than we have by now. Instead, activists such as Audre Lourde stand decades later, addressing the same issues. Lourde, what with being a middle-aged, black, lesbian feminist with children, faces much of this oppression, and finds herself frowned upon by society.
My first impression of her work is that she portrays scenes from African American plantation life, however, I noticed that sexual and violent, images are represented repeatedly in her landscapes. She exaggerates the history of slavery and race in America. Kara Walker's art work represents racism, slavery and sexual abuse but it seems that race dominates everything in Walker's art work. She finds a chaos of ideas and emotions. Its mostly based on the white vs. black in slavery.
arol Gilligan—influential feminist psychologist and author—is worried. Gilligan's 1982 book In Another Voice (called "the little book that started a revolution" by Harvard University Press) electrified the pundit class with its premise that girls were fundamentally misread and oppressed by American society. The advocacy programs promoting equality for girls that resulted from Gilligan's call-to-arms have had an impact few would deny. In fact, they may have worked too well, as schools generally acknowledge that girls now outshine boys in grades and high level-course enrollment (even in math and science, says the National Center for Education Statistics) and outnumber them in formerly male bastions such as honor societies, debating clubs and
. In popular culture, black people are creating the media that portrays them, often as commodities. Yet in many ways - rap videos, for instance, that glorify the ghetto and present women as sex objects - they are reinforcing negative images,” (Potier). Many rap videos, lyrics, and TV characters, and the limited amount of diverse images of black women is poison to the African-American female community. These negative elements of the media only create a harder obstacle, creating equality in the mass media, for African-American women to
I’ll start off with General Strain theory, it states that strain can be caused by failure to achieve positively valued stimuli, the loss of positively valued stimuli, and presentation of negative stimuli. In Compelled to Crime, the African American battered women were overwhelmed with strain, in response they acted out by committing an array of different crimes. The reasoning behind this could be because of their low levels of social support. The African American battered women did not have a lot of support; they were most of the time cut off from their families and friends. Another example of how strain applies to these women can be seen in Agnew’s writings when he said “Data suggest that child abuse and neglect negative school experiences, chronic unemployment, and residence in deprived communities are important causes sate anger and that such anger explains much of the effective of strains on crime.” (Agnew, Chp.
Black feminism refers to a movement of African American women who argue that sexism, racism and oppression are bound together. The way these relate to each other is called intersectionality. Intersectionality means intersectionality is a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another.. Black feminism resembles the dalit women because even dalit woman For a Dalit woman, the struggle is three folds as she faces discrimination, based on caste, class and gender.. They believe that black women experience more oppressive behaviour than white women and therefore
The Struggle Continues Many feminists addressed the plight of African American women during the New Negro movement in the US. They shared the same problems and visions but some differ in strategy. The African American educator Elise McDougald’s essay “The Struggle of Negro Women for Race and Sex Emancipation” employs an interesting strategy to gain individuality amongst African American women. While displaying the direct issues similar to those of her allies, McDougald approaches her antagonists with an unusual method. This was an extremely audacious essay and a great subject to debate for that reason.