Narrating difference: Contemporary American women writers v. critical race theorists

Critical race theorists analyze how the language of laws and court decisions perpetuate systemic racism, white privilege, and power relations. Rather than writing in the impersonal, so-called objective form long-established in traditional legal studies, these scholars blend personal experience and storytelling within their legal and historical analysis. Although the commonalities seem obvious, the academic boundaries between the legal and literary studies disciplines have worked to obscure the intersections between critical race theory (CRT) and literary production. My thesis attempts to transcend confining academic boundaries in order to illuminate the multiple intersections between social categories of difference, which include race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. The critical race theorists and contemporary American women writers included in this study offer clear evidence of the way both groups of writers experiment with narrative approaches in order to begin to dismantle a variety of social constructions of difference.; In order to highlight commonalities and promote dialogue, I have organized each of my chapters around a literary and CRT textual juxtaposition. This method has enabled me to demonstrate how both groups of writers resist systemic oppression through a dual emphasis on content and form. Following my conceptual introduction, Chapter Two foregrounds the history of whiteness, applying Cheryl Harris' theory of “whiteness as property” to Joyce Carol Oates' novel Bellefleur. Chapter Three employs Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality to analyze the stereotypes of white trash exposed in Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller. Chapter Four foregrounds the critique of the model minority myth that Neil Gotanda, Mari Matsuda, and Angelo Ancheta develop in order to reconsider the debate over Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Chapter Five examines the connection between Latino/a invisibility and language put forth by Juan Perea and Christopher David Ruiz Cameron as a means for understanding the central issues in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!. My final chapter highlights the parallel writing strategies featured in the writing of Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell, two writers who create supernatural female characters in order to critique and resist the conservative backlash that denies a history of systemic oppression.