Dual Oppression: Race, Gender, and Masculinity in Walker and Morrison

Abstract

Feminist readings of African American women’s fiction often treat Alice Walker and Toni Morrison separately, with Walker read for domestic and sexual violence and Morrison for racial ideology and the memory of slavery. This study reads them together to show how patriarchal domination, racial subjugation, and hegemonic masculinity work in tandem, and in doing so extends intersectional feminist thought by tracing how structural power turns into intimate violence. Using close textual analysis, it examines Walker’s The Color Purple, “Everyday Use,” and “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy,” and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Sula. Passages of violence, coercion, and resistance were coded under critical race theory and Black feminist thought, Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, and masculinity studies, then compared across the texts. The analysis yields three findings. Violence within Black families emerges as a product of racial emasculation operating inside a patriarchal culture, not as individual failing. Economic dependence secures consent in Walker’s fiction, while internalized racial ideology does the same in Morrison’s. Female solidarity, whether emotional, economic, or communal, weakens patriarchal control where it is present. In selected texts, the control on body and children is gradually transformed into self-definition, economic independence, and control of memory and heritage in terms of Black female autonomy. The findings are limited to chosen works only. Walker and Morrison use literature to record trauma, reclaim the self, and imagine social and political agency.