Male Gaze As A Tool Of The Cult Of Womanhood

Nichols uses humour as the main deconstructive strategy to be an efficient tool for subverting the myths that have oppressed black women. The woman’s body acquires relevance, as the poems focus on a black immigrant woman within a context of white supremacy. Nichols creates persona who she uses to represent the black female body and she constitutes a challenge to black women’s objectification in the Western (British) society, in which she is exiled. The writer occasionally speaks in the first person, has no name, so the third-person poetic voice refers to her as ‘the fat black woman’. The fat black woman refuses to be a victim and, therefore, rejects all the traps laid by racist and sexist society by means of stereotypes that aim at constricting her into limiting roles. It is her that

The poems “Tableau” and “Incident” by Countee Cullen are about racism, but both have a different take on it. The African American author wrote in 1900’s , when racism was common and more acceptable. Cullen’s work became more popular during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s. Both poems are developed with different writing mechanics to convey a clear message to the reader or audience. Cullen uses figurative language and tone to develop the theme in each text.

This poem focuses on the lynching of a African American male. The speaker of the poem appears to console a woman who appears to be distressed due to the events taking place. In the first four lines of stanza 1, the speaker says:

Poverty and hardship are shown to create vulnerability in female characters, particularly the female servants, allowing powerful men to manipulate and sexually abuse them. Kent illustrates how poverty perpetuates maltreatment and abuse in a society like Burial Rites using the characters of Agnes’ mother Ingveldur and Agnes. Agnes’ mother is forced to make invidious choices as her children are “lugged along” from farm to farm, where she is sexually exploited by her employers. In spite of these circumstances, Agnes’ mother is commonly referred to as a whore in their society which abhors female promiscuity yet disregards male promiscuity as a harmless character trait; as in the case of Natan, who is merely “indiscreet” despite all his philandering. Born into poverty, Agnes experiences similar sexual coercion and manipulation from her “masters” and yet is labelled “a woman who is loose with her emotions and looser with her morals”. The severe poverty of Agnes is explicitly demonstrated to the reader by Kent through the intertextual reference of her entire belongings - a very dismal, piteous list to be “sold if a decent offer is presented”. Furthermore, Kent contrasts the situation of Agnes, a “landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty”, to the comparative security Steina has experienced using a rhetorical question from

This book is made up of two cycles of poems, each confronting the same subject: the characterization of a black man in white America. In this book, I plan to focus mainly on the first cycle and touch briefly on the second. The first cycle includes four different sections. In section one of cycle one, Eady writes about Susan Smith and Charles Stuart, two murderers who blamed their crimes on nonexistent black attackers. The first poem is called “How I Got Born” (Eady 5), in this poem the fictional young African American man is conjured up. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, Eady writes a note that explains who and what the speaker is: “The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children” (Eady 5). In the first few lines of the poem he says, “Susan Smith willed me alive/ At the moment/ Her babies sank into the lake” (l. 1-40). So right away he gives us a pretty straightforward explanation for what this poem is about and what this section will be about. In the next few poems, the narrator discusses his “existence” and reason for being created. Eady uses a lot of metaphors, similes and imagery in his poems, and he does a phenomenal job with imagery.

Prostitution, sometimes referred to as “the world’s oldest profession” (Henslin, pg. 54), is defined by James M. Henslin as “the renting of one’s body for sexual purposes” (pg. 54). This arrangement, though illegal and socially deviant in most parts of the world, exists universally in many different forms (pg. 54). As a matter of fact, types of prostitutes range greatly in variety from call girls – who are said to be “the elite of prostitutes” (pg. 58), to streetwalkers – “who have the lowest status among prostitutes” (pg. 58), to sugar babies -young, physically attractive women who provide “rich, older men” (Kitchener, par.4) “…with attention (and sex) in exchange for the finer things in life” (par. 4).

The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset,

In Toomer’s Cane, miscommunication gives root to many problems such as static characters, misunderstandings, violence, and even death. The reason that communication fails in Jean Toomer’s Cane is because of the way men objectify women as objects of nature to be studied and interpreted. The women are compared to the beauty of nature by the men of the novel which suggests that men only see the exteriority of women and they cannot see the interiority of the female character. The use of connecting women to nature suggests that Jean Toomer is looking at gender and how masculinity shapes the female role into isolation as physical objects of sexual desires. Communication fails because men only regard women as surfaces that have no identities. Men

In The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, James shows readers the Jamaican sugar plantation that occurred during the 19th century. James shapes his plot as close to the ruthless actualities of slavery it imposes on people, and there are two perspectives that touch on this idea too: “A revenge tragedy for our times” by Donna Bailey Nurse and “RACISM IN THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN” by VS Agami. In James’ novel, the protagonist, Lilith, is a dark-skinned slave who struggles to surpass the violence into which she is born. Through the motif of circles and Lilith’s slave experiences, James portrays a structure of human oppression in slavery, achieved through his writing style, which leads to violence being the only outcome.

In “The Changing Same,” Deborah E. McDowell illustrates the stereotype of the hyper-sexual black female, and its influence on black women writers. She writes, “During slavery the white slave master helped to construct an image of black female sexuality that shifted responsibility for his own sexual passions onto his female slaves” (37). To reclaim their sexuality, they often created black characters who were deliberately chaste or asexual. Such is the case in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, in which Helga crane is a deliberately unsexual heroine, unable to reconcile her lack of sexuality with society’s expectations of her. In Their Eyes, Janie’s emerging sexual curiosity is initially stifled by Nanny, and then temporarily snuffed out by Jody under

Women who bare a child for 9 months in her womb, will go to great lengths to protect the child from harm. Living in a world in which women are living in poverty face gross inequalities and injustice from birth to death. Throughout Night Women, Danticat illuminates how being a mother requires sacrifices in order to protect their young. In the mother’s words, “The night is the time I dread the most in my life. Yet if I am to live I must depend on it.” (71) She knows she must work in order to make a living to provide for her young son. She is displeased with selling her body to a suitor, but if that will bring a meal to the table for her son, she will sell. Despite the imprint of prostitution, the mother like all mothers who do all they can to

I am a big fan of poetry but it came as a bit of surprise to me how unexperienced I am with such deep sorrow in so few words. It isn’t that I haven’t read anything tragic, far from it, but I think as prettily moving as some of the words can be, they are still just words and they often lack such well known context behind them. After reading the page on Jim Crow I immediately opened the book and began this week’s readings. I did not know about the blackface that blacks themselves sometimes wore while performing in those humiliating plays.

In this essay, I will develop a critical analysis of contemporary mainstream film and I will argue that attitudes and behaviour within this industry are adapting, albeit slowly, to respond to developing attitudes within society. To assert this theory, I will focus specifically upon the identity of the gaze and discuss how this has been applied, previously and currently, in action and science fiction films; expanding upon Laura Mulvey’s argument in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), regarding voyeurism and the application of ‘the male gaze’. The ‘gaze’ is a term that describes how we engage with visual media. Mulvey posits that there are three types of cinematic gaze to be considered in mainstream film; that of the characters, that of the camera and that of the audience. She explores the idea that the gaze is always male; a theory

The issue of prostitution has long been a controversial one. With the growing objectifying of women’s bodies, as well as the purchasing and selling of sexuality as a commodity, there is an “even more pressing need to understand the commodification of sex in the range and diversity of forms that prostitution is taking, and to analyze the significance of and impact of these developments on women’s status” (Barry 1994). Counter arguments to this claim that prostitution is “a practice of women’s resistance to sexual liberation from norms and traditional moral principles of sexuality that have served to control and subordinate women (Jeffreys 2009).” Thus, prostitution is said to be a form of liberation rather than a form of oppression.

Beauty can be seen in every shape, form, or size. Despite the difference in its existence, it cannot be treated different. Beauty is beauty. Here Claude McKay, Ben Jonson, and Paul Dunbar allow us to see beauty in different forms, however all meaning the same thing. From beauty in simplicity, beauty in showing one's true emotions, and beauty in equality. “The White City” , “Still To Be Neat, Still To Be Dressed”, and “We Wear The Mask”, reveal the definition of beauty in deviating embodiments. The juxtaposition, repetition, and antithesis in the poems helps clarify the author’s purpose.