Blog 8

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros and Maxine Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey both incorporate important lessons and techniques that are important to our overall experiment. In today’s society, there are a lot of stereotypes that I have grown up hearing, whether on T.V., or in magazines, or during everyday interaction. As much as I have heard derogatory terms being spoken, they have never been spoken freely. When I say freely, I mean that saying such things in society today is considered a bad thing, and looked down upon because it is thought of as taboo, and going against the doxa of today. I am African American myself, but of a much lighter skin than most and I have had people say nigger in front of me; not to me personally, but in front of me and they instantly get uncomfortable and apologize, or if they don’t, I will definitely let them know of their ignorance. To call an African American a nigger today would be completely inappropriate, but less than fifty years ago it was common, and back when there were slaves, that term was a regular. In other words, it was not filtered. Both of these exerpts/short stories use the technique of going against the doxa by “un-filtering” their writing. Each talks about things that are totally inappropriate, like beating on your pregnant wife, and even killing your wife which are mentioned in Woman Hollering Creek, or referring to people stereotypically as F.O.B.’s or gwai, which were referenced in Tripmaster Monkey. Both of these writings are completely un-filtered and it is possible that someone could take these references the wrong way, especially if they did not know the ethnicity or gender of the authors. This technique helped to get me interested in the story because I am not use to reading things that go against the consensus like there pieces of writing do.