Woman born

would like to analyze the short story “No Woman Born” with regard to questions of gender and gender performance. As Judith Butler suggests, gender identities are a “kind of imitation of which there is no original” (Fuss 21), she believes that gender identities are socially constructed and social acts that we perform and imitate in order to fall into one of the gender categories to be perceived a certain way. This underlying idea is what happens in No Woman Born, to the character of Deirdre. In the

The book entitled “Of Woman Born” includes an overview of motherhood as an institution where the author asserts that being a mother has been changing with times. As the world moves, motherhood has changed from ancient societies that revered women to patriarchal civilization. In the book, the author has explained motherhood as an institution and has been defined as the ways power is maintained and transferred in an invisible manner. The power in this institution is transferred in a way that it is

birth, in order to regulate and shape them into this “ideal” heterosexual being. Men are expected to embrace masculine qualities, while women are required to be feminine and submissive to the male authority. Monique Wittig’s article, “One is Not Born a Woman” observes how the class of “women” is not “natural,” but is created by the society and framed by the male ideology, as a way of producing a clear gender difference between men and women. J. M Coetzee reinforces Wittig’s beliefs by sharing similar

For many years now, women have strived to gained equality with men. They have been held back from many opportunities due to the fact that they are women. Monique Wittig, a twentieth century feminist theorist who wrote an essay called “One is not born a woman” raised questions about the ideas of gender and sexuality. Helene Cixous, a twentieth century feminist who wrote “The Laugh of Medusa” urges women to write to reclaim their sexuality and identity through writing. Emma Watson, a 21 twenty-first

The Role of Men in Of Woman Born   Adrienne Rich, via Of Woman Born, has created a wonderfully complex description and analysis of the condition of being a woman in our patriarchal American culture, or at least in the middle-class, white portion of it, as she acknowledges in the introduction to the 1986 edition of the book. Since I happen to fit into this category, I find this book to be very personally satisfying, although I can certainly imagine that Rich's writings wouldn't be completely

Of Woman Born – The End of Motherhood   In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich effectively weaves her own story into a convincing account of what it means to become a mother within the bonds of patriarchal culture. Her conclusion that the institution of motherhood, which she distinguishes from motherhood, must be destroyed in order to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult

I immensely enjoyed reading Heather Corinna’s article, I, Being Born Woman and Suppressed due to the fact that it was able to elicit varied personal thoughts and feelings. Throughout the piece, Corinna structures their argument around the suppression of menstruation and thus the suppression of those with a uterus, highlighting how completely ingrained internalized misogyny is and how it can affect people in a multitude of ways. For instance, Corinna spends some time discussing how internalized misogyny

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”  French existentialist writer, Simone de Beauvoir, states in The Second Sex (1949), powerful analysis of what a woman should be in the West. She goes into detail on how femininity is a social construct and was constructed for the male gaze, the patriarchy (Nigel Warburton, 2014). This is an argument in both Sandra Lee Bartky’s Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, according to her, you are born into your gender, not the characteristics

Dispassionate Passion: A Close Reading of Millay’s “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” traces the physical and psychological venture of a woman as she indulges in the passion of a one-night stand. Throughout the sonnet, literary elements function to facilitate the emergence of a paradox surrounding the speaker’s existence as both an active subject and a passive object in the encounter described. In analyzing the woman’s experience

Distressed” Edna Vincent Millay is a popular American female poet in the twentieth century known for her works in relations to feminist issues. One of her poems “I, Being born a Woman and Distressed” or Sonnet XLI is a poem written in a feminist point of view about the conflict of being a woman. While some scholars believe that this poem was written about “women victimization” or how men are more liberated than women in every aspect of life, from personal to political (Fried 2), other scholars like