Body as Danger: Gender, race and body in Toni Morrison's Sula

Abstract

h is paper aims at tackling the question as to why Sula as a social nonconformist and sexual dissident ends up as an avatar of evil, a powerless victim of witch-hunt and eventually a scapegoat for the decline and misfortunes of her community. To facilitate this critical task, this paper shall i rst apply Michel Foucault's genealogy of "the body as the bearer of pleasure and desire" as laid out in Abnormal to illustrate that Christian folks in Sula's community interpret Sula's nonconformity as evil and treat her as a danger to their social order. h us, this paper argues that the black folks' ostracism of Sula betokens their mass hysteria and witch-hunt to exorcise their community of danger and evil. Moreover, this paper suggests that Sula is gendered and racialized as a black witch and symbolically executed. In conclusion, this paper contends that an identii cation of body with l esh, a phallocentric gender ideology and race bias converge into the black folk's association of Sula with a witch and a danger and their subsequent victimization of Sula as a scapegoat for all the misfortunes of their community. Keywords: body politics; gender politics; Toni Morrison; Sula; witch, witch-hunt.

Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison's Sula and Paradise: A Foucauldian Study

“…Though both Sula and Ajax disregard social conventions by remaining unmarried and practicing sexual anarchy, the community scapegoats Sula as she is a woman. In this regard, Ni (2015) emphasizes that Sula was labeled as a roach, bitch, pariah, or witch by her community for three reasons: first, for her rejection of the strict patriarchal society's gender norms for women; second, for rejecting the gendered stereotype that women should care for the elderly; third, due to her desire to emulate men. Women are deprived of their freedom by patriarchal society's normalization of the idea that marriage is a prerequisite.…”

“…Sula's mother, Hannah, does not follow patriarchal society's surveillance mechanism for sex and practices free sex with her friends, neighbors, and tenants' husbands. Ironically, Hannah receives unwavering support from males as their sexual patronage and never gets punishment from them (Ni, 2015). They even stand up for her and shield her from their wives' critical remarks.…”

“…From Foucault's biopolitical views, Santori (2012) examines Sula to explore the politics of maternal violence, biopower, and race. Applying Foucault's view of the body as the bearer of pleasure and desire, Ni (2015) studies the same novel to illustrate that Christianized folks in the Bottom interpret Sula's social dissidence and sexual emancipation as evil and treat her as a threat to the social order. Motalebzadeh and Ghassab (2014) also study it to illustrate the effects of color on the marginalization of different characters in the novel concerning Foucauldian theories of the Panopticon, resistance, and power.…”