Versatile Black Female Identity in Olympia Vernon’s Eden

Abstract

Political movements of racism and feminism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries included monolithic approaches to identity that treated each category of race and gender exclusively. As a result, these movements fail to serve the black feminist liberation project because they do not treat blackness and gender as interlocking aspects that shape their experience. Therefore, this article aims to examine how black women’s intersectional position is represented in Eden(2003), a novel about the American South by Olympia Vernon, and how this examination enhances a powerful, versatile black female identity. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and gendered subjectivity as positionality, this study highlights how black Maddy Dangerfield, the protagonist, navigates women’s racial and gender suppression in the novel. In doing so, Maddy acquires consciousness that problematic racial and gender configurations throughout history do not necessarily hold deterministic powers over her subjectivity. In this sense, versatility as a form of radical black female subjectivity is an outcome of a simultaneous positioning as part of a historical context and detached from the determinism of that context. Maddy uses her positional perspective to create new meanings about blackness and femaleness. This process exposes how values attached to race and gender hold no deterministic power over a woman’s subjectivity. The significance of this study lies in shedding light on how versatile black female identity is part of a non-traditional way of resisting racial and gender domination that enacts engaging intersectionality and positionality