الفهرس 
Chapter I: IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The term of “subjectivity” is utilized within this dissertation as it is based on the ideas, feelings or experiences existing in individual’s mind rather than in the real world. This term is accurately applied through the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks and Betty Shamieh as two contemporary American women of different ethnic minorities. Consequently, the central theme in the works of these dramatists tries to conserve or to recover autonomous subjectivity of the female characters marginalized by mainstream American culture. This makes the voices of their subjectivity and identity clearly heard.
Suzan-Lori Parks was born in 1963 into a military family spending part of her childhood in Germany . She eventually returned to the United States. As an African American born in the second half of the 20th century, Parks belongs to an innovative generation of black writers who have developed a new awareness of blackness. This generation no longer seeks affirmation of the dominant white culture which has contributed to the creation of new creative writings. In 2002, contemporary playwright Suzan-Lori Parks won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and her popularity has been on the rise ever since.
Betty Shamieh who was born in 1965, is a Palestinian-American female playwright. Her parents immigrated from Ramallah to San Francisco, California during the mid-1960. Both of her parents embraced the arts and encouraged their daughter to write and to perform. She remained for three years at University of California, Berkeley and then transferred, as a junior, to Harvard University.
The dissertation expresses two types of the oppressed ethnic female subjectivities. The first type of females’ oppression is reflected in Park’s plays which depicts the traditional woman as a victim of the oppressive male-dominant society. The second type is created in Shamieh’s plays when the contemporary society demands from the superwoman too many professional responsibilities as well as traditional roles.
This study attempts to investigate the politics that African or Arab Americans manipulate to articulate their silenced subjectivity. In order to challenge the social pretenses and domains of the American dominant oppression that make their subjectivity structurally oppressed, the ethnic females have determined to resist and undermine all these oppressive pretenses and domains. To involve all these points, the researcher divides the dissertation into Chapters.
Chapter I is an introductory chapter in which the term of subjectivity is presented. Then, it deals with the first movements of women’s emancipation in the American society. After that, the researcher handles the autobiographical elements of the two female playwrights.
Chapter II deals with Parks’s two plays as a symbol of the traditional oppression for the ethnic females .The first play is entitled In the Blood which depicts a black woman who is an impoverished with five fatherless sons. The word ”slut” is scrawled on her door as a kind of contempt for her bad behaviour by the dominant society; while some American women do like her without being called ”slut”. The second play The Red Letter revolves around a woman who is forced to choose either to become an abortionist, to wear a letter signifies that she is abortionist, or to go to prison. The worse came to the worst when she is forced to kill her son at the end of the play to save him from the pain of being tortured or from making him witness the dogs eating his body parts alive by cruel legislators.
Chapter III embodies two plays as a symbol of presently- oppressed female subjectivity. Roar is the first play which deals with Karema as a living example of a super woman where she performs her traditional roles such as a mother, a housewife as well as the responsibility of running a shop. The second play The Black Eyed provides us with examples of superwomen who attempt to explore several matters relating to their subjectivity.