Negotiating Identities and Feminist Waves: Liberal Feminism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Blonde Roots, and The Emperor’s Babe

Resumo

Feminism is a cultural, social and political movement dedicated to promoting gender equality with an emphasis on defending women’s rights. The feminist waves are different time periods in history when people worked to get more rights and equality for women. To combat gender inequality, liberal feminism places a strong emphasis on individual rights, equality and freedom. The study aims to explore how identities, feminist waves and liberal feminism are negotiated in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019), Blonde Roots (2008) and The Emperor’s Babe (2001). The study employs a qualitative textual analysis of Bernardine Evaristo’s novels Girl, Woman, Other, Blonde Roots, and The Emperor’s Babe to achieve the aim of the study. It applies John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Martha Nussbaum's Sex and Social Justice and Susan Moller Okin's Justice, Gender and Family as a theoretical framework to analyse the selected novels. The results of the study demonstrated how Evaristo depicted intersecting identities and evolving feminist waves, emphasising equality and autonomy in liberal feminism. Autonomy means a woman’s ability to make her own choices and shape her identity freely. The research findings highlighted how Evaristo explored the negotiation of identities and patriarchal norms, aligning with the principles of liberal feminism. The novelty of this research lies in its examination of liberal feminism across feminist waves as interwoven in Evaristo’s select novels. This study only looks at a few of Evaristo’s novels. This means that it might not show how she deals with feminist and identity issues in all of her writing.