Ntozake Shange and Cherrie Moraga: The Courageous Voices Towards Constructing Identity

Abstract

Over the last several years, there has been a growing interest among American women playwrights in examining the mechanisms by which American women's identities have been shaped within the intersecting frameworks of gender, race, and class within American culture. In the early years of the current century, a limited number of women playwrights explored the processes of socialization. However, it is only during the last three decades that a significant number of women playwrights have critically analyzed the adverse dimensions of America's ideological beliefs and practices.

Ntozake Shange and Cherrie Moraga, two contemporary playwrights, are in the vanguard of women playwrights this century who are addressing the consequences of America's dominant ideology on women's identities. Dramatists from three diverse cultural backgrounds—African American, andChicana/o,—show how women in each react to a patriarchal society dominated by white, heterosexual, middle-class males. Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, and Cherrie Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost: A Stage Play in Three Portraits are examined by showing the similarities and differences.