Citation:
Date Published:
7 January 2023Abstract:
This study argues that Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, published when the feminist revisionist myth-making movement was influential, is a paradigm-shifting narrative prefiguring the theory of gender as performance, which later gained popularity in the canon of contemporary women’s writing. Like the writer’s other subversive texts, it is a heterodox novel that anticipates the main lines of Judith Butler’s gender theory and provides fictional avatars for subsequent women writers. The key theme in Carter’s fiction is the loss of the sense of the norm regarding known sexual categories and traditional gender boundaries. Accordingly, the paper examines gender identity construction in terms of performativity and gender transitivity in The Passion of New Eve by interrogating the process of Evelyn’s forced sex transformation and Tristessa’s iconic characterization as a Hollywood “beauty queen,” to show how the author questions essentialist conceptions and authenticity of gendered subjectivity through her “self-contradictory” and gender-blurring characters.
December 2022:
Mustafa Kirca is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Çankaya University in Ankara. He holds a PhD in English literature from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research focuses on translation and comparative studies, contemporary literature, metafiction and parodic re-writing in contemporary fiction. He recently co-edited Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections: Imagological Readings (2019).
Sıla Erkılıç has been working in Central Bank of Republic of Turkey at Governor’s Office since 2012. She holds her BA in Translation and Interpretation from Hacettepe University (2010) and her MA in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Çankaya University (2016). Her research interest includes twentieth century women’s writing, contemporary fiction, and translation.