To me Judith Butler is saying that there is already a existing idea or belief of gender roles and how we are supposed to act even before we are born. ” Nobody is really a gender from the start”. Our culture plays a huge role in defining our gender roles . But Butler says our actions determine who we are. According to Butler ” when we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that out acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.”

The Toni Morrison book that I read is titled, “The Bluest Eye”. Published in 1970, the novel follows the life of an African American girl named Pecola. Set in Morrison’s home town of Lorain, Ohio, Pecola faces a world of discrimination because of her dark skin. She considers that her features are ugly and unfeminine, often comparing herself to the likes of Shirley Temple believing white features are the most beautiful. Pecola lives a volatile life. Her dad is an alcoholic and her mother is detached from her family. When Pecola’s mother, Pauline, is around, her parents go at one another, violently. Sammy, her brother, often runs away as a result of the domestic instability. If she had blue eyes and light skin, Pecola believes, that she would be treated better and loved by her parents and people around her; though her environment reaffirms the beliefs she holds against herself—that she is ugly. Pecola is often teased by the neighborhood boys, her friend Maureen (who has light skin) often makes fun of her and when she is blamed for killing a boy’s cat, his mother calls Pecola a “nasty little black bitch”.

Later on, it is told that Pecola’s parents also lived hard lives. Pecola’s mother works for a white woman and enjoys this work because she loves the home and hates her own. She has always felt withdrawn from her family. Pecola’s father, Cholly, was abandoned as a child and tried to find his father only to be rejected by him. He feels trapped in his marriage. As Pecola washes dishes, her father Cholly takes advantage of her and rapes her out of frustration. When her mother Pauline arrives home, Pecola tells her mother what happened but beats her because she thinks she is lying. After the incident, Pecola finds out that she is pregnant with her father’s child. Her friends try their best to advocate for the baby’s survival because the rest of the neighborhood believe the baby should die. During the birth of her child, Pecola’s baby dies. Cholly rapes Pecola a second time and his guilt drives him to run away and he ends up dying in a warehouse.

To connect with “Playing in the Dark”, both stories relate in ways of determining beauty which usually means whiteness. Both stories discuss characters who view whiteness as superior and their own colorful beauty as ugly and unpleasant.

The three posts that were most impactful to me were posts # 4, 9 and this post. 🙂 Post # 4 and 9 resonated with me because it taught me something new. Watching a movie of our choice then relating it to the class gave us full creativity and I appreciated that. But it also allowed me to analyze the movie and find the meaningful points about feminism. Post #9 taught me about what it means to disidentify with something, and I really found a connection in my life how I disidentified with one half of my culture. Writing this reflection post has allowed me to look back to the beginning of the semester and remember how I knew very little about the topics revolving around feminism and now I have so much knowledge about the subject. I would say that my definition remains the same, I would just add that feminism is also about race, political views, gender, the environment around us and so much more.

I have read the book “LOVE” by Toni Morrison published in 2003. In the book, the main character Bill Cosey was the successful millionaire owner of Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, a high-end vacation spot for wealthy African Americans, mostly from the East Coast. Cosey was married twice, and his second wife, Heed, was only eleven at the time, in addition to being the best friend of Cosey’s granddaughter . The novel explains how different events in the Civil Rights Movement impacted Cosey’s businesses in the 1960s, before its eventual closing in the 1980s. The central conflict, however, is between Heed and Christine, both of whom occupy the former resort building. Each woman believes she is entitled to Cosey’s hotly contested, barely-there will because of her connection to him. The two women despise each other, and each works to gain the sole ownership of Cosey’s inheritance. Heed even hires a phony named Junior, a young offender who begins having an affair with fourteen-year-old Romen, the grandson of one of Bill Cosey’s former fishing buddies, who works for both Heed and Christine. 

The novel, at various points, introduces other women who were present in Cosey’s life. L, as the former cook at the resort, seems to have the most reasonable impression of Cosey as both a good and a bad man. The reader is also introduced to Celestial, a sex worker with whom Cosey fell in love. By the novel’s end, Heed and Christine are finally able to reconcile to an extent, largely based on a common understanding that their hatred and fighting were the result of Cosey’s moral failings. Christine remarks that both women “sold (themselves) to the highest bidder,” perhaps meaning that Cosey was an ideal they tried to please and that in doing so, each gave up her independent identity. Overall, the novel tries to examine the various meanings of love, family, and the African American experience through the lives of these female characters who all knew the same troubled yet charming myth of a man.

Morrison’s essay “Playing in the Dark” and the novel “Love” both are the terms of “Africanist presence” in the American literary imagination. “Playing in the Dark” focuses primarily on the literary imagination of European Americans and how it has been impacted by the coexistence of Africans and Europeans in this country. In particular, Morrison examines the kind of roles African American characters have been given in novels and other works not written by them, and what ends these roles have served, whether artistic or societal. “Love” continues Morrison’s project of exploring African-American history and culture.

Main Characters: Florens, Blacksmith, Lina, Sorrow, Rebekka and Jacob Vaark.

A Mercy is a story about a young black slave girl living on the D’Ortega plantation. Jacob Vaark, a trader, goes to Maryland to settle a debt with the plantation owner. The owner is unable to pay the debt so offers one of his slaves instead. Jacob makes known he wants a female slave. Florens gets sent off with Jacob and she feel abandoned by her mother. At the Vaark farm, Florens meets Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, and their servants Lina and Sorrow. Jacob begins accumulating wealth and starts to build a large home similar to the one on the D’Ortega plantation. Florens falls in love with the blacksmith, who is a freed African man. later on sorrow gets ill with smallpox and eventually Jacobs contracts it as well, right when the house is almost finished. His last wish was to be taken to his new house to die. After his funeral, Rebekka falls ill as well. Florens sets out to find the blacksmith so that he can heal Rebekka the way he did Sorrow. While the blacksmith goes to heal Rebekka, Florens stays at his place to watch over a little boy he has adopted. While she is with the boy she grows jealous of him, thinking that the Blacksmith will love the little boy more than her. She accidentally breaks the boys arm and when the blacksmith returns he kicks her out the house, and Florens goes back to the Vaarks. When she returns, everyone has changed and has new outlooks on life. Florens never finds out the real reason her mother gave her up, which was to save her from a lifetime of sexual abuse from the D’Ortega’s.

The book that I have chosen to read for our Toni Morrison “Choose Your Own” book report is entitled Tar Baby. This book follows the love story of Jadine and Son, two lovers who find themselves romantically involved after a chance meeting. Son, a young black man from Eloe, Florida, finds himself aboard a yacht that floats him away from the harbor of Queen of France and to a small island called Isle des Chevaliers. It is here that he finds hidden refuge within the Street family home and meets Jadine Childs, the niece of two of the Street’s in-house servants. Although both of the novel’s protagonists are black, their life experiences differ widely which ultimately shapes the way that society perceives them and vice versa. Morrison titles her book Tar Baby, an attribution to an age old folktale that describes a pesky cabbage stealing rabbit that meets his match when he encounters a tar doll that has been purposely set up by the afflicted farmer. The more the rabbit fights and interacts with the tar doll the more entangled it gets in the stickiness of the tar. She parallels this tale to Jadine’s very existence. This story is set in the late 1970s, a period in time that can be seen as a culmination of all the social progressive values that began to take root in the 1960s. The majority of Jadine’s adult life was spent abroad as she studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. She grew to unknowingly reject her blackness and began to assimilate within the white communities in which she lived and studied. This lead to her dealing with negative responses when interacting with other black women. When she and Son, who is Morrison’s chosen representation of a proud black man with the ability to navigate all areas of society, finally meet their opposing experiences within their community draw them to each other (not to mention, their physical attraction to one another). After getting to know each other, they almost instantly begin on a carefree journey of love and solitude starting by traveling to New York to live together. This quickly sours when the two decide to visit Son’s hometown of Eloe, Florida. Jadine is finally able to see that their differences are far too great for their relationship to proceed. She realizes during the trip that carrying on a relationship with Son would not account for the continued confliction she would feel within herself if she continued to attempt to please everyone. She left Son in Florida and ultimately the relationship altogether. Through the beginning of the novel, Jadine can be considered the “tar baby” as she is there to hold every relationship together in her life. She attempts to discover a new side of herself in order to be happy with Son and is seemingly the saving grace that holds together the Street’s dysfunctional marriage. As the novel progresses, she in my opinion becomes more self-aware and realizes that she doesn’t have to please anyone by conforming to the constraints created by race and/or gender.