The Representation of Gender and Sexuality

In this book, the author critically evaluates the (re)presentation of gender and sexuality in Zora Huston's Their Eyes and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. It considers the ways in which perspectives of gender, subjectivity and sexuality structure the discourse of these two writers and how they manage to (re)read and (re)write the conventional and canonical stories of African American women. In order to engage in this task, suitable concepts and tools from both feminist literary theory and critical discourse analysis are used. The feminist perspective on the novels reflects new ways of understanding how these texts make sense of Black American women's experiences of conflict, contradiction and oppression. The discourse analysis highlights the multiplicity of discourses used and demonstrates the complex and subtle ways in which taken-for-granted social assumptions about gender, subjectivity and sexuality are discursively (re)produced, negotiated and contested. In the process, it becomes clear that new perspectives of the novels can be reached due to their complexity in terms of novelistic vision and innovative use of discourse.