Feminism

Feminism is a constant and complex presence in Evaristo’s novel. She considers feminism in a broad sense, speculating on how she likes to think her maternal grandmother’s independence made her a feminist of sorts — despite the woman’s bigoted and racist attitudes — while also grounding her feminist insights in matters of race and other social factors. She reflects on how in her youth, her ideas of feminism were conflated with lesbianism and an idea of feminine superiority, but this was complicated by an abusive relationship she had with another woman, whom she refers to as The Mental Dominatrix (TMD): “the fault lines in my moral elevation of women as a superior species and my attendant negative attitude towards men were exposed as defective” (103). Evaristo ultimately expresses her current notion of feminism as one that acknowledges the various ways in which women experience inequality, considering this...