Browsing by Author "Crook, Amber"
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- ItemIncorrigible : resisting heteropatriarchy, the purity of girls, and the epitome of ‘woman’(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-03) Crook, Amber; Sanger, Nadia; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A study of girlhood in conjunction with the mother-daughter relationship offers a unique lens through which to analyse what it means to be a girl child in certain modern societies, and how a girl child’s becoming is regulated by various heteropatriarchal structures and institutions, including the institution of motherhood. There is necessity in acknowledging the way in which girls are socially conditioned and primed to become women, and that they are essentially entangled with their maternal figures, but likewise that they have agency to choose for and position themselves. Moreover, there is increased urgency to recognise the racial, class and individual differences amongst girls and women in order to challenge ‘ideal’ femininity as a totalising group discourse that seeks to subordinate and control these bodily experiences. Through examining three literary texts – Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and Sandra Charles’s Eve – this dissertation ultimately concludes that despite the conditioning of girls and women to maintain motherhood as the archetype of femininity by way of the socially and discursively constructed category ‘woman’, there are various ways of being both a ‘woman’ and a mother. Thus, the agency and diversity of girls and women is made palpable in their ability to ‘take up’ and fulfil multiple subject positons, or put differently, to both survive and resist heteropatriarchy and its ideals.