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llel list of their orientations. The list catalogs their favorite movies, crushes, colors and professional aspirations, and a few of their answers match one another. However, these differences are later discovered by Keisha to be economic inequalities between the black and the white in the council estate. In contrast to her family that live hand to mouth in a small council flat, Leah’s family move into a council estate house which has three bedrooms. In school, Keisha also learns in angst that being the friend of the popular Leah Hanwell, one of a few white girls in the school, “constituted a sort of passport, lending Keisha a protected form of access in most situations” (194). While in the absence of Leah, she is disempowered into so called “church kids”, most of whom were Nigerian or otherwise African, experiencing “profound isolation” (194). Her revengeful “will-to-power” (185) as a result of school bullying grows into an unconscious taking pleasure in Leah’s misfortunes in the future. 

Chapter 3  Corporeal Vulnerability of Northwest Individuals ......................... 36

3.1 Nonautonomous Subjects in Neoliberal Gender Norms ..................... 36

3.2 Unauthentic Selves in Postcolonial Identity Politics ..................... 40

3.3 Injured Bodies in Failed Multicultural Conviviality ..................... 42

Conclusion ................................... 46

Chapter 3 Corporeal Vulnerability of Northwest Individuals

3.1 Nonautonomous Subjects in Neoliberal Gender Norms

Female protagonists’ corporeal vulnerability to hegemonic neoliberal gender norms is presented through their repressed subjectivity in motherhood and sexuality. Writing about the issue of subjectivity, Judith Butler explains that “the self delimits itself, and decides on the material for its self-making, but the delimitation that the self performs takes place through norms which are, indisputably, already in place” (“Rethinking Vulnerability” 225), thus, subjectivity is vulnerable to “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect that it names” (“Gender Trouble” 2). In the novel, Smith shows Natalie and Leah’s repressed subjectivity implied in the very ideas of motherhood and heterosexuality which represent the patriarchal gender norms and neoliberal logic of assimilation. 

Leah’s spiritual crisis in the novel is mostly caused by motherhood. Nancy Chodorow corroborates that those “behaviors that sabotage fertility and pregnancy…meet up with an unconscious belief and commitment with time standing still” (103). Leah’s wish for stillness and fears of losing herself and her identity result in a rejection of motherhood which she equals to definiteness and death. However, she is constantly pressured into motherhood by her own mother, husband and female colleagues. Though she rejects from the bottom of her heart the image of “normal woman”, whereby woman is understood as an essentialist category, and the “institution of motherhood as compulsory for women” (Butler, “Gender Trouble” 92), Leah tries to behave as “normal women do” (Smith, NW 35) when being with her colleagues. After finding out that she is pregnant, she has her third abortion. But Leah’s concerns ove本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。