Feminist Literature: An impossible? Working with Toni Morrison's Paradise

Abstract

Identifying a literary work as literary is being increasingly problematized (Eagleton, 2012); and even more when it comes to classifying it as a feminist literary work. In this article I want to explore the relationship between literature and feminism in terms of political strategies. For those purposes, I approach the state of literature through an epistemological framework called “agential realism” (Barad, 2003; 2007). Afterwards, I will take a concrete example, Toni Morrison, and analyze one of her novel under this framework Paradise. I argue that feminist literature and reality are part of a continuum. This continuum implies thinking of literature as a political self-transforming matter that produces certain disruptions within contemporary society in order to shift the repetitive patterns that perpetuate oppressions.