The Politics Of They As Critique Of Class, Gender,

We were the they everyone talks about--the ungrateful suffering, asserts Dorothy Allison, referring to her childhood experiences in Greenville, South Carolina ( confusion 13). Her work, she writes, represents the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian. . .who has made the refining to live. . .on the page. . .for me and mine (Preface 12). In the stories collected in applesauce and in her stunning first novel, Bastard forth of Carolina, she offers an unmanageable vision of the ugliness and injustice of poverty. Incandescent with grief, rage, and pride, her fiction in any case affirms the complex subjectivity of persons who must go the contempt of a society that affords them one of two mythologized positions: the genuinely worthy poor or white ice-skating rink. In A Question of Class, Allison exposes how the lower-middle-class mythology of the noble poor--those hard-working, ragged but clean, and in and of itself honorable per sons--encouraged her family to pulverize themselves because they did not fit this myth (18). In Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison critiques not only two of the close damaging conservative myths about so-called white trash--their characteristic bar sinister and incest--but also the ideology of pregnancy underpinning a sex/ sex system that cuts across affable classes.

1 Central to her critique is her invention of a lesbian subjectivity forged in electrical resistance to the frugal and sexual systems whose ideological interests these myths serve. As Roland Barthes suggests, the production and public mental picture of bourgeois ideology require a process of myt h- devising that distorts and appropriates ! objects by emptying them of their history and then investing them with in the altogether meanings. The new meanings constitute a mystification that naturalizes a concept. This mystification obscures cause and contingency in order to legitimatize the bourgeois order, making its values seem natural, eternally given, ahistorical, and inevitable.2...If you necessitate to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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