View Chapters

Book: Embodiment and Black Religion

Chapter: 4. Unchained Bodies: Black Womanhood, Resistance, and Complex Subjectivity in Black Literature

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.27406

Blurb:

We continue to interrogate the religious significance of creative reconstructions of the black body through cultural production by turning to two literary depictions of black women in Chapter 4, “Unchained Bodies: Female Embodied Experience and Radical Subjectivity in Black Literature.” Here, we posit that the female protagonists in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed assume “gender fluid” identities that subvert patriarchal and white supremacist constructions of black women’s bodies.

Chapter Contributors