(Re)inscribing the feminine: Gender and sociopolitical marginalization in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison

The conceptual framework for this project began to take shape as feminists began to debate feminism(s): theoretical versus activist perspectives; Anglo-American versus French perspectives; middle-class versus working-class perspectives; women of color versus Anglo-European perspectives; women of the "third" world versus women of the "first"; and so forth. It became clear that the political categories of race, ethnicity, and nationality as well as class informed a woman's sense of "self," her feminine identity. These non-gender-related concerns profoundly affected the founding principles of the various feminisms and effected the formulation of each particular group's feminist issues.; The two writers selected for this study, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, exemplify not only the complexity of contemporary feminism and postcoloniality but the paradoxical nature of literary studies in the late twentieth-century.; Both Morrison and Atwood employ a similar strategy to a different end. Not the least of their concern is the complex way that they represent the affect of political feminization on their male characters, a matter which this study considers in detail. Each writer begins to redefine their ethnic/national group by confronting the effects of socio-political feminization by (1) de-inscribing the female body as the "masculine" subject's object and (2) re-inscribing the feminine through an existentially-defined female presence. Through this process, both writers constitute a feminine subjective identity that is inseparable from their ethnic-national identity.