Browsing by Subject "Womanhood"

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    Representations of deviant black british womxnhood in bernadine evaristo's girl, woman, other (2019): exploring aesthetic and narrative deviance in portraits of black diasporic womanhood through experimental fiction
    (2025) Mazibuko, Siphelele; Moji, Polo; Ouma, Christopher
    Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 novel, Girl, Woman, Other renders the portraits of twelve Black British womxn whose converging narratives span a distance of almost one hundred years. In this plurivocal experimental novel, the author's distinctive narrative style of fusion fiction, characterised by a free-flowing, punctuationless, prose poetic structure reconstructs and reimagines these twelve diasporic narratives through the form of the text. While the content of the overlapping and intersecting narratives offers deviant portraits of Black Womxn who live in opposition to traditional images of Black diasporic womxnhood from gendered, racialised and sexualised perspectives, this thesis aims to argue for the form of the novel and its narrative strategies as not just necessary but inevitable for the kind of deviance it renders. Through close critical analysis of the form and content of Girl, Woman, Other as well as comparative exercises with relevant diasporic literature, the development toward this experimental sub-genre of fusion fiction is traced alongside the development of Evaristo's corpus populated by a world of deviant womxn. Finally, by way of the complexity of the twelve Black British characters and the dimension created by the fusion fiction, Girl, Woman, Other is presented as not simply a re-construction and re-imagination of Black British womaxnhood through experimental fiction but as an aesthetic practice of liberation for Black diasporic women. This thesis contributes to the recognition of experimental Black woman authors who utilize their work to redefine and recover their narratives from within the rich margins of diaspora.
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    Representations of post-apartheid black womanhood in the novels of Angela Makholwa and Kopano Matlwa
    (2025) Dass, Sadie; Boswell, Barbara-Anne
    This thesis examines representations of post-apartheid Black womanhood in the selected novels of South African authors, Kopano Matlwa (2006 & 2016) and Angela Makholwa (2017/2018) by placing them within the context of the changes in South Africa from the time of apartheid to the present. This study shows how these women interpret, through writing, the experiences of women and how women are positioned both in the home, and out, as agents of change in a changing society. The key question driving this research is: In what way do the works of Matlwa and Makholwa illustrate the issues of class and race in relation to women in post-apartheid South Africa? The study aims to fill the gaps in the literature concerning the representation of women's experiences in contemporary South Africa. Previous work has not yet fully addressed the degree to which women writers manage to convey the ideas and realities of gender and social construction in a society recovering from apartheid. In response to the research question this thesis employs a textual analysis in order to study the selected literature. This thesis assesses how the respective authors and their bodies of work, Matlwa's Coconut (2006) and Period Pain (2016) and Makholwa's The Blessed Girl (2017/2018), construct the identities of their characters. To this end, in this way the study discusses the problems faced by these women in society. The evidence suggests that Matlwa and Makholwa, to a certain extent, represent women's lives and perspectives from the angles of struggle against patriarchy and systemic oppression, as well as demonstrating the agency of women and their resilience and strength of character as can be seen from the text.