In the context of the relations between Dill and other characters, how is Dill’s identity represented and explored throughout the novel?

Tolerance without labels

Gender as a social concept in America underwent dramatic change in the 1960s for women and men. At the start of the decade the ideal American family  was centered around rigid roles consisting of the “Breadwinning father, [the] stay-at-home mother and [their] children.” There was major progressive change in the roles of the specific genders at the start of the second wave of feminism,  but while the roles changed genders did not. With the publication of the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and the increase of women in the workforce, progress for the female sex was become tangible, but unfortunately this did not translate to those outside of the cisnormative binaries.

The Intertwined Minds of Lori-Parks and Ozeki

            Billy Beede is not the only narrator made available throughout the journey to Willa Mae’s body. By diving into different character’s minds, Parks gives her readers a more complex understanding of Billy Beede and the circumstances she finds herself in. Parks externalizes the reader’s point of view instead of providing a story based solely on Billy’s bias; by doing so, she provides an opportunity for the reader to obtain a lifelike and realistic representation version of the events. Parks specifically uses this tactic in moments that dramatize and exemplify Billy’s behavior. Using the current narrator’s ignorance, the audience is able to grasp a new angle of Billy because of the outside view in.

In Suzan Lori-Parks novel, Getting Mother’s Body, Billy Beede stresses her desire to be her own person and maintain no connection with, her mother, Willa Mae’s reputation. Despite her desire to be free from her mother’s shadow, Billy still uses tricks that her mother used. These tricks, for example looking for holes or the ring trick, were used by Willa Mae to get what she wanted. While Billy tries to deny her similarity to her mother, their connection and overlapping characters are undeniable and she only increases their similarities throughout the book. However, Billy continues to deny the similarities because she is afraid to become her mother.

A question that arose after reading Suzan- Lori Park’s “Getting Mother’s Body” was: do readers enter contact zones every time they pick up a book? In "Arts of the Contact Zones", Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power…”(Pratt 34). Readers react differently as they bring their own experiences as well as cultures and backgrounds when reading a piece of work. In this case I, the reader, am a middle class Asian American reading a story set in the 1960s with lower class, black characters. As a result, the environments along with the way of life these characters live are drastically different from mine.

Vivian O’Bannon

Jody Cohen

Emily Balch Seminar: Changing Our Story

October 28, 2016

Gender: A Complex Trait to Inherit

Suzan-Lori Parks takes on many controversial issues in her novel Getting Mother’s Body: abortion, race, socioeconomic status, homosexuality, and countless other topics are explored throughout the work. One of these important matters is that of female subordination. Two of the main characters in the novel, Billy Beede and her Aunt June, find their lives dictated by men, and share a common struggle to regain control of their respective paths. In Getting Mother’s Body, June’s arranged marriage and Billy’s unplanned pregnancy highlight the issue of women being subordinated and controlled by men.

           The novel “Getting Mother’s Body” by Suzan-Lori Parks focuses on the members of the Beede family, who are notorious for their bad luck, and all that they are able to achieve in spite of it . Throughout “Getting Mother’s Body” various characters often use the Beedes’ reputation as a punchline, and this element of humor makes it more difficult to pin down the nature of Beedeism. Beedes are poor, undignified, unlucky, the kind of people who bury treasure in the ground and are always able to scam their way into getting what they want. That list was derived mainly from comments of non-Beedes, like Dill Smiles, and Beedes-in-denial like Estelle Beede Rochfoucault. The Beedes understand themselves a bit differently.