Revealing the Dimensions of Violence and Survival: Gender Based Violence and Intersectionality in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

One of the most comprehensive themes about the intersectionality of gender-based violence, resistance, and self-identity is arguably elegantly included in The Color Purple, which was authored by, Alice Walker. This novel is set in the early years in the Southern part of the United States around the 20th century and it depicts the life of Celie an African American woman who experiences oppression as a result of racism and sexual gender violence. This paper contextualizes the production of the color purple within the broader paradigms of race, gender, and sexuality addressing the issue of multi-vocality concerning identity and oppression. The understanding of race and gender as informational assets makes it fundamentally easier to comprehend the processes of becoming from the point of victimhood to empowerment at the same time within the standpoint of the framework of Walker's Celie and her evolvement within a patriarchal and racially segregated society. It is with this lens that Walker focuses on family and community to portray how systemic structures abuse and silence other inner women in society. This criticism focuses further with Walker's protagonists of women's inner world as the intersection of different identities, sex, class, and race as modified and theorized by The Black Feminism, Critical Race Studies, and Trauma Theory into the realms of gender-based violence.

Key words: Gender based violence, Intersectionality, Sexism, African American literature.