Reweaving Femininity: Corporeality, Space, and Consciousness in Gloria Naylor’s Fiction

作者：X Ye · 发表于：Contemporary Women s Writing · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1093/cww/vpag003 · 研究领域：Latin American and Latino Studies、Caribbean history, culture, and politics、Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Abstract As an African-American woman writer in the late twentieth century, Gloria Naylor always focused on the predicament and breakthrough of Black women’s subjectivity under the triple oppression of race, gender, and class. This article selects three of Naylor’s most representative novels—Bailey’s Café (1992), Linden Hills (1985), and Mama Day (1988)—and conducts an analysis following a thematic arc, rather than the chronological order of publication. Specifically, the article adopts a thematic arc that builds from an “ideal model” of collective corporeal autonomy (in Bailey’s Café), to a “critical diagnosis” of patriarchal capitalism’s co-option of Black womanhood (in Linden Hills), and finally to a “synthesis” of individual agency, cultural heritage, and communal connection (in Mama Day). Together, these three novels trace an evolving vision of resistance. By taking Black women’s “lived experience” as her source, Naylor not only deconstructs the myths of “victim” and “other” in patriarchal discourse but also constructs a Black feminist view of subjectivity that emphasizes the dialectical unity of body, space, and psychology. This view of subjectivity is not a static identity label but a dynamic practice of existence, thereby providing an analytical paradigm with both aesthetic and political significance for contemporary African-American literary research.