¶ … Female Body
Review of Margret Atwood's Short Prose Piece
"The Female Body" was a short piece that appeared in the Michigan Review in the early nineties that had many feminist themes featured within it. Feminism focuses on combating the marginalization and objectification of women and defend equality among the sexes. There are many dimensions in which it is argued that women receive inferior consideration in society such as in employment opportunities or compensation, social arrangements, or just perceptions of norms of behaviors among others. Margaret Atwood illustrates in her work the disconnect between many women and their own bodies. For instance, if the female body is an object, then the individual female may not be in control of that object.
The primary objective of the essay is to make people realize how they view the female body and discover their own disposition and prejudices. To achieve her objective, she uses many examples from many different perspectives so that the reader will likely relate to one. For example, Atwood uses the perspective of the family in the essay, and includes the opinions of the mother and father and what they want their daughter to understand about the female body. The husband...
" A story narrating the life of the abused Minnie Foster, wife to John Wright, and her killing of her husband as a means to express her oppression and experiences of abuse from him. Like the narrator's downfall to insanity in "Yellow wallpaper," Minnie's character in "A jury" reflects the lack of avenue for women to express their feelings and thoughts, resorting instead to actions that are considered deviant in
And "civilized" also means being corrupted by rampant economic temptations and in the process, ruining the land; and the narrator goes to great lengths to show that she "...wishes to not be human," which is a linking of "guilt and self-knowledge," according to Janice Fiamengo's essay (in The American Review of Canadian Studies). Essayist Fiamengo quotes Atwood from a 1972 interview (Surfacing was published in 1972) in which the author
" Soon thereafter Marian begins struggling with eating and acting more feminine (out of character) due to the pressures imposed by the expectations of society. Atwood's implication is that this expectation of femininity dehumanizes woman, restricting their potential to self-actualize and personal freedom. The author's portrayal of Marian as feminine and weak indicates she is programmed to act this way and unable to consciously behave in any other manner. Marian
2. Sociocultural needs. The study by Gibson and Myers examined the relationships among social coping resources, growth-fostering relationships, and infertility stress in 83 women who participated in fertility treatments at urban medical clinics. The findings of their study suggest that both social coping resources and growth-fostering relationships contribute significantly to the variance in infertility stress, with infertility stress decreasing as social coping resources increase; these findings are congruent with the
Freibert; "The custom of using the handmaid for progeny permeated Israelite history and custom" (Domville, 2006). Legal documents that date back to the 15th Century BC support biblical records of that practice, Domville continues. In another scholarly article in the University of Toronto Quarterly (Neuman, 2006), the writer explains that Atwood, and outspoken feminist from Canada, insisted after publishing the book that she, Atwood, "invented nothing" in her descriptions of
Gender, Sexuality, and Identity -- Question 2 "So, is the category bisexuality less or more threatening to the status quo than is homosexuality?" The passage suggests that in fact, rather than presenting patriarchic constructs of identity with less threatening formulation of human sexual identity, bisexuality does the exact opposite -- it presents common social norms with the more threatening notion that human sexuality is not an either/or 'Chinese menu' option of
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