Conseula Francis’ “Flipping The Script: Romancing Zane’s Urban Erotica” is an analysis of how contemporary romance novelist, Zane, frees African American women through her “frank and open discussion of sex as liberatory” (Francis 169). Zane has been called an “erotic revolutionary, someone who challenges traditional scripts that offer men greater pleasure to indulge in a fuller range of sexual expression” (Francis 168). Francis states that Zane accomplishes a rare feat in her ability to “[reframe African American] female sexuality as a space for emotional satisfaction rather than a space defined by physical and emotional oppression” (Francis 169). As a result of how distinctively counter-cultural Zane’s work is, her work is oftentimes mistakenly …show more content…
Cole creates a base to her story that could easily result in the all too typical woman-demeaning narrative of African American historical romance literature. Instead, Cole seizes an opportunity, just as Zane does, to confront the negative stigmatization of African American woman and replace it with one of an African American woman rooted in self-possession, one who, as Francis states, takes “active, intelligent control of her [her] life” (Francis 170). When Friedman asks Wallis why she won’t wait for him to go to a protest in Mississippi with her, she replies, “Because even a docile girl like me has to stand up for herself sometimes, and that time is right now” (Cole 294). For the first time in her life, she owns her purpose. Wallis has sex with Friedman, despite what society has told her about how she should approach sexuality: timidly. The yielding and unassertive woman Wallis once was is gone when she is with Friedman. Instead, Wallis is a woman who understands her source of pleasures and seeks it out on her own terms. Wallis is a dominant force in bed and in her own life. In the final chapter of Cole’s piece, Wallis sings to Friedman in church, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine” (Cole 307). While she could just be singing the lyrics of a popular church hymn, or she could just be referring to Friedman, I like to think that Cole included the lyrics as an ode to her sexuality. She is going to let her sexuality, her womanhood, her strength, her ambition–all of herself–shine shamelessly in a world where she is her own authority. Both Zane and Cole’s work act as a testimony that the beast of racist patriarchy can be defeated, one badass African American heroine at a
In 1975 the death of Franco and forty years of dictatorship and censorship offered Spanish women the freedom to reexamine their identity and question their role in a patriarchal society. At the same time on another continent, African-American women are also struggling to find their identity among the numerous American literary images that, until the 20th-century, had not realistically represented their gender or race. Notwithstanding the different histories, geographies, and ethnicities between African-American and Spanish women, a common thread that appears to bind them is their inheritance of a legacy of struggle against the internalization of controlling patriarchal perceptions and images of women that lead them to believe that they are, indeed, the stereoty...
Anne Moody's story is one of success filled with setbacks and depression. Her life had a great importance because without her, and many others, involvement in the civil rights movement it would have not occurred with such power and force. An issue that is suppressing so many people needs to be addressed with strength, dedication, and determination, all qualities that Anne Moody strived in. With her exhaustion illustrated at the end of her book, the reader understands her doubt of all of her hard work. Yet the reader has an outside perspective and knows that Anne tells a story of success. It is all her struggles and depression that makes her story that much more powerful and ending with the greatest results of Civil Rights and Voting Rights for her and all African Americans.
Over the course of our country's history, social constructs have been dismantled to become less obtrusive to the groups they conflict and aim to negatively portray. However, this has not always been a truth of time, and although there exists less stereotyping and predispositions to minorities now than in in the past, the day in which we are free of it is not manifest. In Langston Hughes’ “Red Silk Stockings”, the portrayal of black women comes with a seemingly degrading essence, attached through the eyes of white males who are in a position of power and authority. Hughes paints an image of black women who use their bodies, specifically through prostitution, to further their social standing by allowing objectification by the atypical dominant
Women during this Jazz era were freer about their sexuality, but due to this freeness, an article called “Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Need” criticized the sexuality of Black women. In this article, the writers criticized Black women of the Jazz era; one part stated “.“speed and disgust” of the Jazz Age which created women “less discreet and less cautious than their sisters in the years gone by”. These “new” women, she continued, rebelling against the laws of God and man” (p.368). Women expressing their sexuality is not only an act against God, but also against men. In Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” Twyla’s mother Marry had no problem expressing her sexuality because she was a stripper, who danced all night, she wore a fur jack and green slacks to a chapel to meet her daughter Twyla.
To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.
In Anne Moody’s book Coming of Age In Mississippi, we are given a first hand look of what it was like growing up as an African-American in the south during the mid 20th century. Anne recalls many different obstacles in which she had to overcome- or at least stand up to. Many of the struggles Anne faces throughout her early life may not be out of the ordinary for this time, but how Anne chooses to deal with these issues is what truly defines her to be an extraordinary character of American history.
A careful examination of the sexual violence against african-american women in this piece reveals imbalances in the perceptions about gender, and sexuality shed that ultimately make the shift for equality and independence across race and class lines possible during this time period.
Print. The. Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. "Kate Chopin's The Awakening: An Assault on American Racial and Sexual Mythology." Southern Studies 26.4 (Winter 1987): 304-312. Rpt.
Most of Mapplethorpe’s work included erotic imagery with xxx. Many critics have assessed Mapplethorpe’s work in a variety of contexts, including scholar Kobena Mercer in his essay “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe”. In this essay Mercer tries to explore Mapplethorpe’s controversial Black Book photographs, a collection of portraits that often depicted nude black males in styled poses, sometimes with their penis exposed. In this essay, Mercer discusses several themes and interpretations of Mapplethorpe’s
She sheds a light of how early Black feminist scholars such as Collins have been criticized for relying too heavily on colonial ideology around the black female body. Subjectively neglecting the contemporary lived experience of Black women. Critiques such as these highlights the Black female agency in the representation of the body. viewing this as a human and sexual rights or health perspective has been lending to the contemporary Black feminist debates about the representation of Black female bodies and Black eroticism within the culture of
Hunt’s essay may be difficult for some to understand at a level that goes beyond what is said in the passage. I believe that a critical message that readers should take away from this work is the concept of black feminism. Black feminism is the interpretation that race and sex are inevitably linked together. Some acknowledge
Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, grandparents, pimps, prostitutes, straight people, gay people, lesbian people, Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans all have once thing in common: they are products of sexuality. Sexuality is the most common activity in the world, yet is considered taboo and “out of the norm” in modern society. Throughout history, people have been harassed, discriminated against, and shunned for their “sexuality”. One person who knows this all too well is activist and author, Angela Davis. From her experiences, Davis has analyzed the weakness of global society in order to propose intellectual theories on how to change the perspective of sexuality. This research paper will explore the discussions of Angela Davis to prove her determination to combat inequality in gender roles, sexuality, and sexual identity through feminism. I will give a brief biography of Davis in order for the readers to better understand her background, but the primary focus of this paper is the prison industry and its effect on female sexuality.
Wallis serves as a heroine who, through her actions, assures her audience, particularly African American women, that they can and should "not only feel passion, they can [and should] pursue it; that is, they can be sexually aggressive without seeming evil or pathetic" (Cruise). While Wallis begins as the woman who “accepted etiquette books[,]…sewed her dresses with skirts well below the knee[,]…[always] had her hair pressed straight, or pin-curled, and nodded along” when told to do so, she transforms into a woman who is fearless in admitting and pursuing her desires. Wallis’ initial attitude towards sex and sexual desire epitomizes the “conservative sexual behavior [at] the foundation of the performance of…[African American] womanhood” (Francis 179). At the start of Cole’s novella, Wallis’ ability to make decisions for herself was entirely “governed by fear” (Francis 175) indoctrinated by her father and the conditions for her survival in the midst of the Civil Rights
In today’s advanced societies, many laws require men and women to be treated equally. However, in many aspects of life they are still in a subordinated position. Women often do not have equal wages as the men in the same areas; they are still referred to as the “more vulnerable” sex and are highly influenced by men. Choosing my Extended Essay topic I wanted to investigate novels that depict stories in which we can see how exposed women are to the will of men surrounding them. I believe that as being woman I can learn from the way these characters overcome their limitations and become independent, fully liberated from their barriers. When I first saw the movie “Precious” (based on Sapphire’s “Push”) I was shocked at how unprotected the heroine, Precious, is towards society. She is an African-American teenage girl who struggles with accepting herself and her past, but the cruel “unwritten laws” of her time constantly prevent her rise until she becomes the part of a community that will empower her to triumph over her barriers. “The Color Purple” is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Alice Walker which tells the story of a black woman’s, Celie’s, striving for emancipation. (Whitted, 2004) These novels share a similar focus, the self-actualization of a multi-disadvantaged character who with the help of her surrounding will be able to triumph over her original status. In both “The Color Purple” and “Push”, the main characters are exposed to the desire of the men surrounding them, and are doubly vulnerable in society because not only are they women but they also belong to the African-American race, which embodies another barrier for them to emancipate in a world where the white race is still superior to, and more desired as theirs.
In her seminal text, Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins codifies a vast literature on Black feminist thought to develop a coherent social theory. Collins draws from not only social scientific research, but literature, poetry, music and oral history. She highlights the existing exclusion and denial of intersection social identities and intersecting/overlapping systems and forms of domination experienced by sub-populations like Black women in America. Bringing together White myopia and Male myopia, the perspective of the Black feminist highlights that Black women are “set undeniably apart because of race and sex with a unique set of challenges” (Cleage 1993 as cited in Collins 2008).