Dystopian America Analysis
The Rules of Grammar in Dystopian America An unspoken language echoes in the voice of every member of American culture, a sort of Tongues that is heard in the inflections and connotations of every sentence uttered in the United States, regardless of sex culture or creed; although, it affects each voice in a different way. This language is the one formed by society constructs that date back to Portuguese sailors in the Middle Passage, and it is identified by essayist Hortense Spillers in her work, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (71). Spillers identifies the ways in which language interacts with the positionality of race and gender, and depicts what is perhaps the most quintessential aspects of Americana - the prejudices and persecutions hidden
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One with domesticity, that Spillers also elucidates in her text, saying “motherhood and female gendering/ungendering appear so intimately aligned that they seem to speak the same language” (78.) Although they fought alongside men in the liberation revolution, women were pushed back into the kitchens afterwards. Indeed Spillers testifies that despite “the actual day-to-day living of numberless American women” that “ break the enthrallment of a female subject-position (78,)” these acts of liberation are the exception rather than the rule in the syntax of America. In Borden’s work, this is furthered by the martyrdom of Adelaide Norris, who became a threat once she broke out of her “domestic” role of her gender, and while en route to escaping the definitions of society, she is arrested by the institution. She dies in the prison, with her body”discovered” by the audience in a slow pan from right-to-left that showcases the variety of women that are all trapped in the symbolic prison of oppression. Perhaps fittingly, this sequence contains limited amounts of dialogue, illustrating the deafening silence of the American Grammar that killed
One with domesticity, that Spillers also elucidates in her text, saying “motherhood and female gendering/ungendering appear so intimately aligned that they seem to speak the same language” (78.) Although they fought alongside men in the liberation revolution, women were pushed back into the kitchens afterwards. Indeed Spillers testifies that despite “the actual day-to-day living of numberless American women” that “ break the enthrallment of a female subject-position (78,)” these acts of liberation are the exception rather than the rule in the syntax of America. In Borden’s work, this is furthered by the martyrdom of Adelaide Norris, who became a threat once she broke out of her “domestic” role of her gender, and while en route to escaping the definitions of society, she is arrested by the institution. She dies in the prison, with her body”discovered” by the audience in a slow pan from right-to-left that showcases the variety of women that are all trapped in the symbolic prison of oppression. Perhaps fittingly, this sequence contains limited amounts of dialogue, illustrating the deafening silence of the American Grammar that killed