Gender Differences: A Literary Analysis

All in all, fictional works such as Kindred, Beloved and Who Fears Death are extremely important both socially and politically, as fiction in general has an educational function and the power to stimulate personal transformation and social change. The pieces illustrate “how science fiction can continuously stimulate the imagination, present nonstereotypical representations of black people, provide imagined futures and alternative realities, challenge oppression and push the boundaries of thinking about race, racial identity, sex and gender“ (Jackson, 131). The works raise the awareness of race and gender inequality as well as ongoing patriarchy and stimulate the reader to think and question norms and standards on a regular basis. Also, examining

The intersection of the fields is the question of the correlation of gender differences and ethnical, “racial” differences. It is generally agreed upon that the term ‘race’ is socially constructed, rather than describing biological variances, in order to satisfy the human desire to categorize and to manage difference. The term rests on the construction of boundaries or what defines what is to be ‘included’ and ‘excluded’, resulting from the categorizing efforts during Enlightenment (Nünning, 603). Still, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests, the term is used as an ideologically effective “trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which […] also have fundamentally opposed economic interests” (Gates, 5). He believes that race is merely a metaphor humans invented (Gates, 4). Building on Gates’ demonstrations, Ian F. Haney López uses the basic distinction between biological (genetic-based) race and social race for his argument in the article “The Social Construction of Race”. Since science provides no evidence for the former, López’s central argument is that race is exclusively social in its nature. It is perpetuated by meaning systems that add ascriptions to bodily characteristics and personalities. Hence, he “define[s]

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term ‘ethnicity’ as “the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition”. Ethnicity plays a decisive role in a subject’s construction of identity, as the sense of belonging to and identification with a distinct ethnical group equals a positioning in a cultural, historical and linguistic area and hence in a world in the sense of self-definition. In the postcolonial context, ethnicity often functions as an instrument of self-assertion or reconstruction of post-colonially destroyed or damaged cultural identity. Hence, ethnicity is used as a tool for re-centering by marginalized groups tool (Nünning, 195). According to Werner Sollors, Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the term ethnicity always refers to a relationship and not to a “thing-in-itself” (Sollors, 1990, 288). Therefore, it is impossible to determine what the term ethnicity as such means, because “ethnicity is typically based on a contrast” (Sollors, 288). Ethnicity is used in order to differentiate between human beings, Sollors explains and compares the term to categories like “age” or “class”: “If all human beings belonged to one and the same ethnic group we would not need such terms as ‘ethnicity’, though we might then stress other ways of differentiating ourselves such as age, sex, class, place of birth, or