Foucault, Femininity, And The Modernisation Of Patriarchal Power: Book Analysis
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Annie John’s white piano teacher was a shrivelled up old spinster from Lancashire, England who loathed her native student’s manners and looked down upon them as barbaric offspring of an intellectually inferior race. Racial prejudice seemed to be one of the reasons behind this assumption of superiority. When she was twelve Annie shifted to a new school on account of her good credentials. There was the challenge of assimilation and adapting to the new environment. The classmates, the school routine, teachers were all new and hence Annie had to integrate so that she could fit in. Annie describes Miss. Moore the headmistress as a migrant who had come to Antigua from England and who looked amazingly like’ “… a prune left out of its jar a long time…show more content… However, Bartky recognises that Foucault does not consider gender differences and “is blind to [the] disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine” (Bartky, 63-64). She further argues that investigating various disciplinary practices that construct feminine bodies reveals “sexism operating in Western patriarchal society.” (Bartky, 64). However, in doing so, Bartky does not consider racial differences. She argues that “the larger disciplines that construct a ‘feminine’ body out of a female one are by no means race or class specific. Hardly is there any evidence that “women of color or working class women are in general less committed to the incarnation of an ideal femininity than their more privileged sisters” (Bartky, 72). Kincaid’s characters are all of multiracial origin and seem to function exactly in the perception of white and black