Juxtaposition In The Vulva

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The women also use the vulva as a weapon to keep them going long into the battle. “Les Guerilleres take pride in the vulva as a symbol of their strength”. (7 MR) The vulva is also used to juxtapose the position of the male phallic and domination in language, culture, and history. This juxtaposition is fluent within most of the novel which the author found irresistible to withhold in such a text. No doubt it an epic text, and Monique Wittig used it to its full advantage to expose the world, first at the polar opposite to glorify the vulva, then after the author 's point has come across, the women then begin to discard their own symbols, such as the vulva. “They say they must now stop exalting the vulva. They say that they must break the last …show more content…

By juxtaposing this “gender” related act, they in a sense equalize the playing field or destroy the barriers created by these discourses that do not allow other groups besides males to perform this type of act. (Eng 4245) “At last someone says it is like the sound of micturition, that she cannot wait any longer, and squats down. Then some of them form a circle around her to watch the labia expel the urine.” (9) By forming a circle around the woman urinating, allows the women to give testament to the performance of micturition being done by the un-prescribed female gender. Since the women as a whole saw the performance, it allowed the breaking of the binarism to reverberate throughout history, and thus making any connotation to the urinating as a male gender construct …show more content…

“The women menace they attack they hiss the men they revile them jeer at them spit in their faces scoff at them provoke them flout them apostrophize them mishandle them are abrupt with them they speak coarsely to them execrate them call down curses on them.” (116) By demeaning the men in such a way, allows the reader to see that men and women, male and female, are all alike and that social constructs and discourses create barriers for which gender identity must adhere too. In addition, apostrophize means; addressing of a usually absent person or a usually personified thing rhetorically. (Webster) By addressing the men in such a way is similar to how the novel was fashioned in its entirety. The novel itself remains distant from mentioning the men in great detail throughout the text to convey the same meaning. It is to keep the integrity of the epic story in order to materialize

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