Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) is her first landmark work addressing a social problem—rape—that is all too common to girls entering adolescence in the United States. This paper employs a feminist approach that presents the painful narrative of the rape victim and investigates the novel’s promotion of individual, resistant action within the oppressive social structure, achieved through what the postmodernist feminist Judith Butler calls “gender performativity”. It is this individual agency or subjectivity that enables the protagonist in Speak to overcome the adverse effects of rape, which is the product of a patriarchal system that regards females the second sex, to borrow the term by the French, feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir. As such, Speak functions as a site of discursive resistance against such a patriarchal system by resisting some of the popularly held myths that discredit rape victims' narratives.
AbstractConsumption-Tuberculosis or (TB)-is considered as a peculiarly significant disease across different disciplines. This research traces the medical and literary history of the disease then discusses its aestheticised glamour in a number of writings that date back to the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Before being identified as a lethal disease in the 20th century, consumption was dealt with positively during the preceding periods or eras i.e., being consumptive signified love, easy death, female beauty, male creativity and genius, etc. The specific purpose of this academic endeavour is to answer in detail the questions of why, how and when consumption-as a destructive force-was regarded as a strong cultural device for selffashioning and what made the perception on the disease shift or alter from positive to negative-from an aestheticised, romantic disease to a deadly one.
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