Summary 5 - coursework for literature and bibliography class PDF

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Summary 5 Jones exposes how historical forces affect the formation of black female sexuality which is the product of cultural forces. A significant site for the formation of subjectivity is the family. Jones examines the ways in which “desire, sexuality and racial identity” offer “both enabling and constricting options”(Rushdy 276). The blues function as a tool conducing to her self-development. I would use psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny as family secrets are revealed. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok claim that “there is a “phantom” at the heart of a particular kind of psychic trauma” (Rushdy 279). This silence affects Ursa as she is hunted by her family’s secret. In the final scene Mutt says to Ursa that he cannot live according to the past but appreciates it and keeps it in his memory. Ursa’s relationships are permeated by “hatred and love, desolation and desire, exquisite pleasure and desolating pain”(Rushdy 280). In the final scene, Ursa manages to define her place in her matriliniag as well as her displacement from her family’s narrative of abuse. Ursa accepts her responsibility in her victimization. She tries to redefine her sexuality, as her desire is a form of resistance to her sexual victimization. William Andrews states that “when the sex act becomes politicized, as patriarchal power inevitably makes it, it can be best interpreted as a weapon, either of oppression or rebellion” (Rushdy 281). Ursa has suffered a dual form of oppression due to her race and gender he had to resist her “commodification as both economic and sexual being”(Rushdy 281). Ursa’s resistance to sexual exploitation can be viewed as a threat to patriarchy. The final scene can be interpreted as the locus where Ursa re-enacts her Great Gram’s sexual resistance. She was empowered as she had a choice of what action to perform on Mutt. She is aware of her power in this sexual act and at the same time of its danger as it could lead to his castration. Ursa is aware of the history of black men who have suffered from castration and emasculation from white slave owners. Ursa carries the legacy of sexuality as a site of oppression, as her foremothers’ desire was directed by their slaveowner. In order to construct her present, she uses an act of resistance to her past. Ursa could have imitated the woman who emasculate her master, or she could have imitated her Great Gram by breaking the skin of Mutt’s penis, but instead she does not as she realizes that imitation would not lead her to wholeness. She is bale to resuscitate her agency as she transforms her family’s legacy of abuse into one of agency. Jones explores how sexuality and racial identity intersect. Ursa discovers that her body is “totally imprinted by history”. (Rushdy 288). Foucault argues that genealogy turns the body into an “inscribed surface of events” (Rushdy 288). The formulation of sexuality and desire is connected to the past. Ursa’s desires are imbricated in the locus of the slave past. Ursa is in a state of confusion between the expression of her sexuality and desire. She is in a state of confusion in terms of her sexuality. Sexuality has “its basis […] in the patriarchal capitalist order” where “heterosexual coupling functions as a domain of male power” as men consume “the surplus value of women’s leisure: […] female sexuality” and make ““ownership” of women’s bodies” which extends to “what women produce in such relationships: desire” (Rushdy 289). In the case of African American heterosexual relationships, the state of confusion between desire and sexuality stems from the era of slavery, where the master had a “method of simultaneous policing the desire of slaves, commodifying their sexuality and racializing their bodies” (Rushdy 289). As a black woman Ursa’s body is being

racialized as it turned into an object that has been sexually dominated. She has lost the agency to direct her own desires. Directing desire and governing sexuality is historically connected to with racial formation of the female body. Race is continually re-inscribed onto Ursa’s body, who is of African descent, as she falls into the black community’s discourse. In order to break free from the rigid definitional boundaries that “circumscribe sexual desire” Ursa needs to “perform as a subject of desire”( Rushdy 291). Ursa needs to confront the strictures of the past in a way that would accentuate the nature of her sexuality and desire within the discourse of performativity. Performing the blues, gives Ursa the opportunity to reconcile with herself as she makes “the necessary claims of kinship with her past” while achieving “a degree of separation from it” ( Rushdy 292). The blues value is performative as Ursa is able to establish her subjecthood through performance. By performing the blues. Ursa asserts herself and her economic authority, as she establishes her economic independence from her male counterparts. With the blues she is able to tackle the ideologies that turn black women’s bodies into commodities, as she challenges the subjection to the controlling of her desire.

Works cited: Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “‘Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones's Corregidora.” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 2, 2000, p. 273....