In Head Off & Split by Nikky Finney and Butch Geography by Stacey Waite, the reader picks up on many women and gender issues that are portrayed through the text. Stacey Waite used her poetry skills to connect with the reader and allow the reader to feel as though they are the people in the poems. She uses strong language in her poems and uses much power as she reads them. Nikky Finney also uses her poetry skills to portray these gender issues throughout. Both readings display the issue of identity in a women’s life. Butch Geography uses poetry to show real life situations where the narrator runs into a problem finding her identity and who she really is. Head Off & Split uses poetry indirectly describe life events that display a woman not …show more content…
Stacey tries to explain to James that he would not like it if someone compared his name to the word stupid. He does not seem to care and describes to her than James is a real name, so it is a different situation. He is implying that gay people are not real and do not have real feelings. This greatly shows how he feels about women changing her identity and how it is not an accepted thing by everyone. The poems in Stacey Waites book show how she has struggled to get people to accept her identity change and show her the same respect as everyone else. In Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney shows a women’s identity being downgraded in her poem Left. She describes a scene to the reader that seems rather unpleasant. As the reader reads this poem, they may even feel suspense. A specific example of identity is a woman in the poem who has made a sign asking for help. Her sign was missing the letter e on the word please which the reader probably thinks isn’t a big problem. As you continue reading, Finney writes that the woman did not receive help and asks the reader if it was because her sign was not spelled right. This shows that people may judge people just by looking at them. This woman was not treated the same as everyone else because her sign was incorrect. Finney continues to write about the options related to why the woman was not saved. She says, “or was it because the water was rising so fast there wasn’t time” (Finney, 14). Finney is showing the reader that an
"These writers explore both the social roles that confine them and the bodies that represent the confinement". In light of this quotation, compare how the writers explore gender.
This research discusses the many different ways of how society can influence identity. In the book the girl who fell from the sky by Heidi Durrow, it talks about a girl named Rachel Morse. Rachel Morse tries to put her tragic past behind her by keeping away her feelings. She goes to live with her grandmother. Rachel pretends to be a new girl after her mother killed herself and her siblings. As life starts to get hard for her, she remembers her father’s promise that he would come back and get her. The years passed and her father did not come which made Rachel gets more and more annihilate by the way she is judged based on the color of her skin. After Rachel started school in Portland, she became aware of being bi-racial. She believed
In our society today, there are many ways identity plays a role in how people live their lives, as well as how people are viewed or treated by others. A big part of a person’s identity comes from their gender. Men and women are raised differently, whether it be their beliefs and ways of thinking, how they view their future, or the actions they choose to take throughout their lifetime. In both Katha Pollitt and Silko’s essays, they discuss the differences in the lives of men and women and how these differences result from society’s expectations by using metaphors and life examples to explain their message to the reader, as well as allow the reader to connect to this message.
To begin with, the author’s implementation of short sentence fragments throughout the poem illustrates the exasperation and frustration bottled up in women in response to
In fact, most of them are unidentified and the reader may not identify a specific person that speaks in the different chapters. Thus, the audience may understand it is an embodiment of females focusing on structuring the major theme of the book, which is gender inequality. Additionally, the description of the female characters is equivocal such that the reader has to picture the image of the women. Although the author provides various photos in the book, there is absence of an explanation. Before this, the writer only concentrates on telling the story (Kim,165). Additionally, the author uses poetic approach to explain the setting in the book, which gives the novel distinct styles of writing. In fact, the poems are only meant to provide the reader with a description of the mothers and daughters, and this creates a distinction in the narrative. Resultantly, the audience perceives that when a poem appears in the reading, the author is probably narrating the plight of women. Notwithstanding, the novel uses visual art technique to communicate to the audience. in many instances, the author does not provide a description of an individual such that the reader has to imagine the person. In doing so, the readers are in suspense but the author offers a drawing that may be used to demystify the situation. in support of this style, it is apparent that the visual art may have
Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.
Through both poems, Duffy establishes the cause of both the women 's suffering and how it 's the foundation for both of their lives. In the 'Map women ' Duffy uses an extended metaphor that the "women 's skin was a map of the town", the
The difficulties of personal knowledge/identity reflects on a person’s illiteracy. The time they were hardly surviving from people’s prejudice was the time they do not have idea how people see them outside of their island, county and how people judge them by their physical appearance. As a result of not knowing that information, they were not aware of how they will dress or act in public to avoid harsh judgments of people. Also in Walker’s difficulties she was not aware that to let her brother influence her will put her identity into a risk. As a reward of the knowledge about personal identity, Walker learned to to believe on her self, and gained her self-confidence again and that’s when she started
Identity is one of the main questions throughout all of our readings, because it is hard for people to accept who they are in society. Accepting their identity as a minority with little if any freedoms
Despite being a very diverse literature genre in terms of influence and inspiration, North American literature encompasses many works that share some very common thematic elements. Though there are several themes shared, one in particular can be found in most any work – the importance of identity. Particularly in some selected pieces yet to be named, identity is a very important element, not only because it is a necessity for a main character in any work of literature, but because these works express ideas about identity as being very individualistic – as opposed to being a mere result of cultural surroundings. Zora Neal Hurtson’s Their
For instance, Mai Goda, from “Still Me Inside,” punctuates her experience with assumptions when she makes the decision to dye her hair a bright red. Ultimately, she describes instances where she felt intimidated and was classified as part of another group by her appearance. When she arrived late for school, the vice principal mistook her for a punk delinquent. Also, at her flute recital, parents appeared surprised when the beautiful music was coming from the girl with the stark hairstyle. Therefore, although people are judged initially by appearance, the identity of an individual or group is a collection of both self-perception, interests, and social-depiction.
“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity” (Erik Erikson). In literature, identity is used to establish who a character is and what they believe in. In historical fiction, identity functions as a device utilized to give a character more depth and give the reader more of an idea of what the character stands for and the decisions they might make. In Night, despite being a very devout man, after having his faith taken away from him, Elie Wiesel loses his individual identity proving that, when man loses his most important belief, he loses himself and becomes “a corpse” (Wiesel 115).
An expecting couple awaits to discover the gender of their baby. The nurse announces that it’s a girl. The couple is extremely excited, but do they truly grasp the weight of what this implies? Gender is not simply a physical trait, as it affects nearly every aspect of a person’s life. Stereotypes repress the potential in all men and women. The same stereotypes are found throughout literature such as Medea by Euripides, Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, “Sonnets” by Shakespeare, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frederick Waterman’s “The Best Man Wins”. A common thread between these pieces is that power can be gained by those who are suppressed by defying gender stereotypes and social hierarchies.
Akin to intersectional romance fiction, poetry is equivalently as radical. Poetry magnifies the significance of language as a revolutionary tool, one that liberates women and cultivates an environment in which women are free to address their aspirations and anxieties while condemning the ideals of a society that operates under the canons of male chauvinism. In a collection of letters published as a tribute to the late Audre Lorde in Off Our Backs, a feminist newspaper journal written for women by women, one anonymous contributor discusses how Lorde “encourages all women to find their own means of expression, their own poetry to value and to use” (Tyler 32) in her piece “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. In the piece, Lorde discusses how for women, poetry is not a nonessential indulgence, as Caucasian men throughout history have suggested through how they render poetry as an opportunity to “cover [a] desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde contends that poetry is a “vital necessity of [the] existence” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36) of women because it establishes the infrastructure on which women “predicate [their] hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde’s text motivates women to exercise “the power of the word, a freedom for women greatly feared by…patriarchal society” (Tyler 32). Lorde states the poetry
It is impossible to discuss the role of women in literature without mentioning the influence of feminism. The later in the timeline one reads, the more prominent it becomes. Each new wave of feminism brings with it its own goals, yet it also continues to strive for some of the same goals as past generations because not everything is accomplished all at once. Although “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall and “Rubyfruit Jungle” by Rita Mae Brown, are two starkly different texts that strongly reflect the feminist eras in which they were written, they have some similarities as well.