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Gender And Gender Roles : The Black Boys

Decent Essays

Each texts depict gender and identity as an outcome of hierarchy, patriarchy and sexuality, readers are able to associate one’s identity as a social construct. Nurse Ratched’s aids the ‘Black Boys’ portray the negative perception that blacks are inferior to white people in society. This delineates American society at which the novel was written due to ongoing racism despite the American Civil Rights Movement. The Black boys carry out her requests by arranging sadistic beatings on the inmates, they aim to break any individuality and identity the inmates have. Therefore, the Black Boys usurp individual’s identities as a result of lacking their own. Despite McEwan and Plath presenting the stereotypical gender roles with males being the dominant figure and women being the inferior weaker sex, on the contrary, Kesey alters traditional gender roles portraying women as emasculators of men and males as feeble ‘victims of matriarchal oppression’ . Each texts portrayal of gender roles can be questionable. Women were becoming more independent and self-ruling, rejecting patriarchal subordination during the time in which they were written. ‘By the end of the Sixties, more than 80 percent of wives of childbearing age were using contraception after the federal government in 1960 approved a birth control pill. This freed many women from unwanted pregnancy and gave them many more choices, and freedom, in their personal lives’ . Plath and McEwan depict women as inferior yet not muted to

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