Female As A Sex Object In Buck S The Good Earth

The story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land during famine, drought, and revolution.

One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld." Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

This book examines the impact of scientific and sexologic theories on the creation of character in the prose of two moderns, Hemingway and H.D.

Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture is a collection of 17 essays that analyze representations in popular culture of African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American women. The anthology is divided into four parts: film images, beauty images, music, and television. The articles share two intellectual traditions: the authors, predominantly women of color, use an intersectionality perspective in their analysis of popular culture and the representation of women of color, and they identify popular culture as a site of conflict and contestation. Instructors will find this collection to be a convenient textbook for women's studies; media studies; race, class, and gender courses; ethnic studies; and more.

Cultural arrangements for human relationships are heavily coded for sex identification, generatively, economics, disease, violence, families and war. So many new discoveries (birth control, Viagra, in vitro conception, mosaic genetics, surrogate mothers, equal pay for equal work, global population mixing plus edgy media influence and the shift from binaries to spectrums) that much needs to be rethought.

In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available.