Multiplicity and Movement: construction of genderqueer identities in Orlando, Middlesex and Symptoms of being Human

Abstract

This thesis considers the exploration of gender identities that move beyond the binary in Woolf’s Orlando, Eugenides’ Middlesex and Garvin’s Symptoms of being Human. It suggests that, in order to analyse these identities the method of analysis itself must move beyond binary notions. Based upon Butler’s idea of gender performance and Linstead and Pullen’s notion of the multiplicity of gender, a framework is constructed from which the social and the natural can be seen as unavoidably intertwined. Rather than an ‘objective’ reality, we construct a narrative of reality. It is from this ‘narrative of reality’, which is culturally and socially shaped, that individuals construct their narrative of Self, of their own (gender) identity. This thesis then proceeds to show how the genderqueer identities in the texts foreground, explore, deconstruct and challenge this narrative of reality by showing its constructed nature. The genderqueer characters in the novels all construct their own idea of gender, which includes but is not limited to ‘male’ and ‘female’ identities. Their identities move away from the idea of gender as a binary, static and singular concept, but rather construct an image of gender as being rooted in its multiplicity and movement. The text foreground the notion of writing the Self, presenting the need to construct an individual narrative of gender rather than a limited, generalizing concept of gender. Moving beyond binary notions, then, this analysis foregrounds the constructed nature of gender identity in many aspects, such as the social and the body, including how ‘male’ and ‘female’ are narrowed down to mutually exclusive, generalised and static terms, where the genderqueer identity plays with these static concepts. This thesis, then, considers the many ways in which through literature we can read not only the constructed nature of gender, but also the notion of multiplicity and movement which lies beyond it.