From Bodily Imprisonment To Emancipation In Joyce Carol Oates’ Foxfire: Confessions Of A Girl Gang

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the famous American contemporary novelists. Her twenty-second work, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, tells a story of a girl gang FOXFIRE which use violent actions to revenge against the patriarchal society in1950 s of America. This thesis attempts to combine feminist perspective and Foucault’s body theory to reveal in detail how female bodies are imprisoned and suppressed in the patriarchal system, and how women use their bodies to resist male violence actively. In Foxfire, bodies of female characters are confined and tortured under male violence, except which, their mind is disciplined thoroughly with the internalized patriarchal values, which turns women into men’s accomplices and use female violence against other women’s bodies. However, the female characters try various bodily strategies to resist men’s domination, and also use female writing to reconstruct their autonomy and identity.