| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 97 === In the current prospering girls' studies, scholars are gradually emphasizing the importance of intersectional exploration on girls' experiences. Among the independent and contradictory discourses, Girl Power discourse that inevitably gives patent to the middle-class capable girls is conducted in dialogues through a broader lens with Reviving Ophelia discourse that concerns the excluded and less capable party. In this effort for a comprehensive understanding of girls' experiences, scholars also shed light on how each girl's life should be contextualized. Only with the attention to the way gender, class, race, location, (dis)ability, sexuality, and etc. intersect can girls' experiences be fully addressed without simplification.
In accordance with this intersectional framework, girls in the past should also be taken into consideration. Situated in the mid-twentieth century United States, The Bluest Eye and Bastard out of Carolina center on girls as the protagonists and should therefore be treated as girl literature particularly related to girls' experiences. When the authors of both works relate the girls' lives to various factors and dimensions in the story, they also suggest a contextualized and intersectional reading of girls' victimization through sexual violation. This thesis thus attempts to re-read their experiences through the central traumatic events: sexual violence and rape. By separating the texts in individual chapter, I hope to specify how black girls’ little bodies become the scapegoats of a racist society and how the poor white girl, rather than being exempted from the tragedy, also suffers social injustice through rape. In the final chapter, the inextricable interweaving of race, class, and gender ideology on girls' lives will be foregrounded as well as how girls’ final fate can be determined through the working of agency.
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