The Female Subject in a Multicultural Context: Intersectional Reading of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

Using an intersectional feminist approach, this paper explores the construction of women’s identities in a multicultural context as represented in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and Girl, Woman, Other. Intersectional feminism is a reaction against the essentialist view of women which fails to consider the differences and inequalities between women. In The Emperor’s Babe and Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo portrays the interrelationship between the fundamental categories of gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class in the process of identity construction of characters in a multicultural setting. This paper suggests that Evaristo’s selected novels present women who struggle not only because of their gender but also because of their sex, sexuality, class, and colour. The influence of race in the construction of identity and power relations is one of the major concerns of selected novels. An exploration of Evaristo’s representation of the British societies of the 1st and the 21st centuries unveiled the complexities involved in the process of subject formation within the context of cultural diversity. An analysis of the selected texts revealed that the meeting point of different cultures is always conflictual and to build a sense of self, characters choose to either assimilate the attributes of the dominant culture to gain power, blend the attributes of the different cultures to fully integrate their diversified environment, or reject other cultures completely. This study also revealed that the characters’ gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity in the selected texts intersect and support each other in shaping the experiences and lives of women in these novels.