Cender Politics In Toni Morrison’s Love

Toni Morrison’s Love unfolds its narration revolving around Bill Cosey and female characters related to him under the historical background of Civil Rights Movement.Bill Cosey,the core of black community,exerts a subtle influence upon women infatuated with or dependent on him despite his posthumousness.Patriarchal power concentrated in Cosey not only has its roots inside the community,but more importantly,goes viral beyond it.African American females,though suffering predominantly from patriarchal oppression,are actually victimized by an aggregate of gender,racial and class ones.Those complicated oppressive forms and covertness of above oppression are well reflected in the Civil Rights Movement.Focusing on gender politics revealed in Love against the historical backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement,this thesis explores gender relations entangled with other power relations such as race and class,attempting to figure out the operating mechanism behind these forms of oppression.Divided into three chapters,this thesis intends to develop its analysis from three parts:existential predicament of African American women under patriarchal oppression;African American Women’s resistance and compromise in their encounter with patriarchal oppressions;analysis of their outlets on the basis of previous chapters.The first chapter in discussion of female existential dilemma under patriarchal oppression manifested in series of patriarchal signifiers also involves female complicity in patriarchy and invisibility of women in political movements.Female complicity exacerbates the existential dilemma of African American women:under patriarchal discipline,some women internalize patriarchal norms to such a degree that they form self-surveillance and become complicit in patriarchal oppression upon other women.Patriarchal oppression induces female invisibility manifested in political activities with Civil Rights Movement as a representative since female sufferings in those movements derive from interwoven oppression of gender,race and class.The second chapter focuses on African American women’s defiance in encounter with patriarchal oppression and their compromise as well.The defiance could be categorized into three tiers:utilization of female body to fight patriarchal objectification of women turns out to be the most direct resistance against physical assault,a prevalent oppressive form of patriarchy;revolt via language,by constructing and reconstructing their language idagay,break the original link between the signified and the signifier in patriarchal discourse and create a female space,thereby advancing physical defiance to the new level of discourse strategy which intimately relates to construction of female spiritual space in a relatively sense;In contrast to previous tiers,the third category of resistance embodies a comparative subversiveness.Transcending not only time and space,but also life and death,the female L plays authoritative roles inseparable from establishing a new order.Through the narrative humming,L revises the patriarchal voice by revealing the truth of male oppression shunned by the third-person narration and speaks for women from a female perspective.Her correlation with the father god Esu renders her subversion more fundamental.Oriented toward dilemma and compromise of black women,the third chapter analyzes the outlet which could be summarized as constructing both the subjectivity of black women and harmonious gender relations.This chapter first demonstrates that black women’s awakening consciousness of subjectivity presupposes their subjective construction.In discussion of the interrelation between subjective construction of African American women and the one of black people,this chapter takes the Civil Rights Movement as the historical backdrop,revealing the culprit of its failure:the essence of accentuating "black is beautiful"and of white supremacy all point to dual opposition,which explains the existence of gender,race and class oppression.This chapter also shows that men,not the foe against women,are somewhat victimized by patriarchy so that harmonious gender relations on the basis of love and mutual respect need to be constructed in cooperation with male forces.Existential predicaments encountering African American women result from the intertwined gender,race and class oppression rooted in the thinking pattern of binary opposition.Among the oppression above,the most latent and prevalent one should be gender oppression with its manifestation in female complicity with patriarchal rule.Female resistance in Love without changing the fundamental cause could merely be partial rebellion against patriarchy,thereby having its inherent limitation.Through displaying various characters’efforts in constructing female subjective consciousness and harmonious gender relations,Love indeed shows its tentative thinking of expelling binary opposition.Morrison’s writing of this novel thus proves to be a valuable exploration for African American women’s outlets.