The Emancipatory and Transformative Potentials of American Multiethnic Women Writing

Abstract

This paper explores the emancipatory potentials of American women writers of color for victims of gender, class, and the ethnocentric ideologies of racism, colonialism and nationalism. Their struggle against multiple oppressors, on one hand, drive them to form alliances with different oppressed groups such as laborers, homosexuals, the colonized people, immigrants and various ethnic minorities. On the other hand, cultural and ethnic identities are redefined on the basis of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity to cultivate tolerance, interdependence and mutual respect; gender roles are reconsidered in the light of an androgynous ideology, which views men and women as equal partners who should live in harmony but not in conflict; social classes are deconstructed to redress the injustices women and laborers have endured because of their gender, ethnic or racial differences. The plurality and heterogeneity of cultural, ethnic and gendered identities which women writers of color develop are extended to their writing whose language, content, and style are innovated and used as effective strategies to empower and emancipate subaltern groups. Their writing, therefore, assumes an inclusive character in which sexual, cultural and ethnic boundaries disappear, and interracial, intercultural, interethnic and intersexual dialogue is promoted.