My Body Not My Own: An Intersectional View on Relationality in Fiction by Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich

Abstract

This essay makes a contribution to the contemporary struggle against gender violence with an analysis of Toni Morrison's Home (2012) and Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012). The article presents a transethnic comparison combined with an intersectional feminist motivation to highlight the complicity of racism and sexism, and it articulates a theorization of relationality as the way to counter the dissociation derived from violence. Arguing for the pivotal role of the women of color whose bodies are violated —sterilized, raped— in the texts, it offers a close reading of the indirect account of violence, the conflicted male characters, ambivalent symbols and open endings, and the connection to African American and Ojibwe myth. The article leads to the conclusion that relationality is the best response to the systemic violence of the coloniality of gender.

Keywords

• women of color
• racist/sexist violence
• transethnic approach
• intersectionality
• relationality