07/12 7. Identity, Power, and Representation Free Online FlashCards

What is intersectionality in literary analysis?

Intersectionality is the way several social identities combine to produce particular opportunities, constraints, and forms of recognition.

Does representation mean mere presence?

No. Representation asks how a group appears, who speaks, how language and form shape that portrayal, and whether the text reinforces or challenges hierarchy.

How can code-switching shape identity?

Code-switching can express cultural belonging while also revealing pressure to assimilate or the exclusion attached to language varieties.

What can first-person voice do?

First-person narration can give a marginalized speaker authority over their own story, though an unreliable narrator may still reveal limits of self-knowledge.

What does gender analysis examine?

Gender analysis examines who controls space, whose desires are named, and whether the work’s form reinforces or unsettles gender hierarchy.

What makes a literary representation stereotypical?

A stereotype reduces a character to an emblem of a group or a problem for a dominant protagonist, rather than presenting a complex individual life.

How is class represented in literature?

Class can appear through wealth, labor, education, property, occupation, manners, vocabulary, syntax, accent, and access to institutions.

What roles can religion play in literature?

Religion may function as comfort, discipline, oppression, ethical questioning, or cultural continuity, while also intersecting with other identities.

How can queer literature challenge norms?

Queer literature can challenge heterosexuality as the universal norm and portray desire as changing, contextual, or resistant to fixed labels.

What is the disability “overcoming” narrative?

An overcoming narrative treats disability mainly as an obstacle that inspires nondisabled characters, rather than giving disabled characters full agency and ordinary lives.

What does diaspora mean?

Diaspora describes communities dispersed from an ancestral homeland while maintaining or revising connections across places.

How can literature contest national belonging?

National belonging can be represented as contested rather than unified, especially when a text exposes histories of exclusion and claims belonging for marginalized people.