Sethe's Intersectional Identity
nurturement that it offers to her black children becomes insignificant. Sethe explains that her milk for her children “made her fight and holler for it, and have so little left” (114). For the enslaved black woman, her womanhood and blackness are not respected nor sacred.
Sethe’s intersectional identity as a black woman contributes to her distinctive interpretation of gender in a Eurocentric society. In the conceptual framework of gender studies, gender, itself, is a construction of how one perceives the “self.” Gender is a binary that consists of masculine and feminine categories. Gender “denotes those specifically approved roles, behaviors, actions and features that are considered by a society fit for men and women” (Shaheen 197). Sethe
Sethe’s intersectional identity as a black woman contributes to her distinctive interpretation of gender in a Eurocentric society. In the conceptual framework of gender studies, gender, itself, is a construction of how one perceives the “self.” Gender is a binary that consists of masculine and feminine categories. Gender “denotes those specifically approved roles, behaviors, actions and features that are considered by a society fit for men and women” (Shaheen 197). Sethe