Inhabiting the Margins: Personal spaces as the negotiation zones of marginalized subjects

Abstract

In this essay, I investigate the role and underlying political connotations of personal space in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, both of which enunciate marginalized subjectivity in 20th century English-language literature. I concentrate on using literary analysis while comparing the issues of marginalization, private and public resistance, class, race, and gender. While one text focuses on gayness in Paris and one focuses on queer womanhood in America, both reveal the temporal fragility of their respective marginalized spaces and the subjects’ claim to liberation. To situate this analysis in the wider literary and anthropological conversation, I read them against Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks, and several other texts. My analysis argues that even seemingly quotidian actions are inscribed in a complex literary tradition that lies at the intersection of biopolitics, intersectional feminism, and queer heritage.