Pinn/Embodiment and Black Religion, 4. Unchained Bodies

We continue to interrogate the religious significance of creative reconstructions of the black body through cultural production by turning to two literary depictions of black women in Chapter 4, “Unchained Bodies: Female Embodied Experience and Radical Subjectivity in Black Literature.” Here, we posit that the female protagonists in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed assume “gender fluid” identities that subvert patriarchal and white supremacist constructions of black women’s bodies.