Article: Marking the body: the material dislocation of gender in Alice Walker's The Color Purple.(Critical essay)

Bodies are not easy matters in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Though cultural difference may appear at first to be materialized through the body, the relationship between the body and the text's symbolic economy is continuously put into question. A certainty about our ability to recognize and interpret the material difference between bodies informs much of the critical discourse about the text. Celie's initially subordinate gendered position, for example, is understood to be the result of a violent black masculinist and heterosexual inscription of her body through beatings and rapes. Her liberation, according to the prevalent critical interpretation of the novel, takes ...

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