When Language Limits the Lust: Moments of Desire in Ungendered Narrative (original) (raw)

Losing the plot: Twentieth-century literature’s deconstruction of gender and love

In the nineteenth century female writers were only able to conceive of and construct two types of narrative endings for their gender: heterosexual love and marriage, or death. In response to this dichotomy many feminist writers of the twentieth century attempted to construct stories that transcend the interaction and interconnection between gender, heterosexual love and narrative closure. Novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing separate the concepts of the female and heterosexual love, but ultimately end in madness or paralysis. These texts, which sever the narrative from formerly conventional structures of fiction, may momentarily imagine a world devoid from the patriarchal expectation of heterosexual love yet they ultimately leave their characters with feelings of futility, confusion and resignation. This paper argues that the narrative impact of separating female protagonists from heterosexual love is the creation of a new ‘madwoman in the attic’; what I term the ‘eternal madwoman’. Building on Rachel DuPlessis’ Writing Beyond the Ending, and the collection of writing Famous Last Words edited by Alison Booth, the paper aims to offer possible responses to Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s question, ‘How can the symbolic resolution of the madwoman in fictional texts contribute to the transformation of gender ideologies?’ Rather than reinforcing further ruptures in the female/love narrative, Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey is seen as a possible framework for a more hopeful narrative world where descent and ascent and, in turn, the concepts of love and the female can be reunited.

Ungendered Narrative: A New Genre in the Making

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2018

This paper focuses on ungendered narrative with reference to select fictional works, to shed light on the elements that define the genre. One or more characters with an undisclosed gender are the focal point of the narrative. The paper discusses techniques that authors employ to keep gender hidden, such as employing inventive gender-neutral pronouns or not using them at all. First-and second-person points of view are also common modes of narration, as " I " and " you " are gender-neutral. In depicting characters, authors consciously merge masculine and feminine stereotypes to create gender-secretive characters. The heterosexual love interest that has hitherto ruled the creative world is thus replaced by endless gender possibilities with which a couple may identify. Love, rather than the characters' gender, is at the forefront of these works. These narratives confront readers with the importance they assign to gender and their habit of pigeonholing certain behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies into a binary gender system. They force readers to question gender segregation and the consequences of choosing to defy the gender one is assigned at birth. Ultimately, these narratives ask whether gender matters in life.

There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre

Following Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock, we suggest that each romance protagonist has three bodies: a physical body, a social body, and a political body. In applying this insight to the romance genre we focus on the socio-sexual aspects of the social body and the socio-political aspects of the political body, and draw on existing analyses of romance novels in order to explore some of the continuities and variations in the representations of the bodies of romance protagonists and the interactions between those bodies. The primary texts cited span a period of over 200 years and include classics such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as well as a range of more recent category and single-title romances. In what we term the “alchemical” model of romantic relationships, the heroine’s socio-sexual body (her Glittery HooHa) attracts, and ensures the monogamy of, the hero’s socio-sexual body (his Mighty Wang), allowing the heroine’s socio-political body (her Prism) to focus, and benefit from, the attributes of the hero’s socio-political body (his Phallus). This is not the only model of romantic relationships present in the genre and therefore a few of the alternative models are briefly examined. We conclude that the bodies of romance heroes and heroines are sites of reinforcement of, and resistance to, enculturated sexualities and gender ideologies.

Contemporary Erotic Romance: Cunning Linguists or Fifty Shades of Feminist Dismay?

The New Birmingham Review, Dissertation Special Edition (2015)

The opening lines of most contemporary critical theory on the erotic romance genre are about as predictable as erotic romance texts themselves. Critics such as Jayne Ann Krentz (1992), Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan (2009) inform us that the genre is scorned, misunderstood, and that readers of the genre are made to feel ashamed (Krentz, 1992: 1). However, three years after the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy[1], when millions of women now unashamedly access erotic romance on their Kindles, and popular titles make it into mainstream bestseller lists, does this over-protective defence of the genre still hold true? With more fame should come more responsibility; the genre needs to be brought up to date with its new modern readers rather than continuing to justify its well-worn narratives as being ‘subversive’ and ‘empowering’ for women. Therefore, I return to a literary critique of the genre, in particular the three texts, In Too Deep (2008) by Portia Da Costa, Seven Years to Sin (2011[a])[2] by Sylvia Day, and a collection of seventeen short stories edited by Kristina Wright called Best Erotic Romance (2011), to show that for a genre that reflects shifts is social discourses surrounding feminism and female sexuality (Sonnet, 1999, p.171), contemporary erotic romance is behind the times when it comes to modern sex-positive feminism and gender theory.

From Black Lace to Shades of Grey: The Interpellation of the ‘Female Subject’ into Erotic Discourse

2017

In the history of western literature the production and consumption of texts mediating erotic discourse was once a masculine prerogative. Yet a notable feature of the male tradition of pornographic writing has been the common use of a female narrative voice. In this sense a ‘female subject’ who creates and enjoys erotica, has long been anticipated. Over the last twenty years there have been many works of erotic fiction and memoirs published that really are written by women. This has rightly been seen as in itself a sign of women’s empowerment, but it raises the question of whether female authors are producing new forms of erotica or simply assimilating the given patterns of erotic discourse established by the centuries-old tradition of male writers, often masquerading as female narrators. In theoretical terms we might ask whether female writers and readers are simply interpellated into the already established erotic discourse or whether the new forms of erotic fiction provide space ...

Written on the Body: Deconstructing the Patriarchal Ideology in the Classic Adultery Literature

2022

This thesis explores the multidimensional character of desire in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body through a wavelength range of an in-visible spectrum. A closer look at the writer’s use of the imaginary and the erotic suggests that the narrative of “nameless desires” (Oranges 15) is at work with its own power, chipping away at the binaries that undergird the patriarchal regulation of sexuality and subjectivity. At the core of my analysis is the deconstruction of ideologically-privileged conventions which stifle desire and the fluid expression of identity. By undermining the ascendancy of the politico-cultural discourse in favour of an aesthetic of corporeal affectivity, Winterson manages to convey a sense of queer novelty, whilst fluttering some critical dovecotes within an ethical framework. In so doing, this study ventures to scout the Wintersonian subversive quest as the writer creatively experiments with stylistic patterns in unlimited ink of poetic love and fetishistic desire against the hollowing of hackneyed clichés. As she presses on the deep connection between flesh and word, text and body, language and sensuality, Winterson brings the reader into her imaginative world that is opened up to unforeseen possibilities beyond all bounds. For that reason, I seek out to correlate the act of reading with the process of writing, each of which is driven by an overflowing force of desire. Most crucially, to elaborate on the idea of a volatile ‘plural subjectivity,’ this paper endeavors to demonstrate how the unity of the desiring subject is dissolved in “the constructive secretions of the spider’s web” (Barthes 64) where meanings are interwoven on the palimpsestic body of text.

The Paradoxes of Gendered Narratives

2014

This article will investigate the novels The Master (2004) and Brooklyn (2009) as narrative representations of the complexity and shi fting conceptualization of gender, especially as far as character and plot are concern ed. For this, an analysis of narratorial methods with an emphasis on the differe ntiation between focalizer and narrative voice, proves indispensable. My starting point is the pattern of a chiastic attr ibution of gender traits in the two novels, an interpretive model based on several arti cles about 18 -century fiction published in the 1990s. They explain the developmen t of the topoi of man of feeling and woman of sense in English literature from the early 18 th century to Jane Austen (Göbel 1998 and 1999). According to these studies, the characteristics of the opposite sex in the course of the 18 th century are variously assigned to fictional gender roles, thus showing that it is possible to transcend segre gative binary structures in gender. Though this process ...

Girls Write Sex: Reimagining Erotica through the Fictional Sex Lives of Heterosexual Female & Homosexual Male Characters

2018

Eroticism and erotic literature have been, for most of history, legitimately considered of the male domain. Women are simultaneously barred from sexual agency and reduced to sexual objectification; but female writers enter this 'domain' with their own literary traditions of romance novels and slash fan fiction. When the patriarchal imagination places women and femininity at the feet of men, to be subjugated and used for sexual pleasure, and never to be pleased themselves; what can the female and queer imagination add to the re-imagination of sex scenes and erotica? How do the literary traditions of women attempt to negotiate with the sexual politics of objectification, consent, and representation?

Journeys into the void : reformulations of eroticism in contemporary fictions

2017

This collection of short stories and the accompanying critical exegesis interrogates whether eroticism, as defined by Georges Bataille, is possible in contemporary erotic writing. The project employs a Lacanian lens through which to examine the notions of transgression, selfhood, transcendence and language as aspects of Bataillean eroticism. It argues that works in the erotica genre such as Fifty Shades of Grey rely on nostalgia for the transgression of prohibitions that no longer hold moral authority. This project argues, theoretically and creatively, that we must discover and define what constitutes contemporary taboos and prohibitions in mainstream society if we are to formulate new erotic works that explore their transgression.