Bare Essentials: gender fictions, embodiment matters

Abstract

Feminist theory's concern with the subject 'woman' has generated a number of views regarding the use of the term as defining her ontological status within discourse and signification. The crisis of both the sex (female) and the gender (feminine) that traditionally defined her subjectivity has forced feminist theory to reconsider its definition of woman. Butler's notion of performativity has challenged the very notion of a subject that performs his/her gender, as well as the notion of a body on which the mark of gender is inscribed. If sex and gender, and ultimately our bodies, are discursive constructions then where is woman's subjectivity grounded and what are the implications of such an approach to subjectivity for political efficacy?According to Merleau-Ponty "existence realises itself on the body." If the body is the locus of subjectivity then it is to the matter of embodiment, as substance and as point of concern, that we need to turn in order to discuss the development of subjectivity, and gender subjectivity in particular.This thesis deals with the notion of gender as embodied practice and looks at the transgender subject—both transvestite and transsexual—as addressing the matter of embodiment located primarily in transsexuality's desire to occupy material body. In the association that it establishes between gender practices and an experience of the 'flesh as the flesh itself as defining subjectivity, the transsexual body, 'the matter of embodiment' as it has been argued, opens up a space for the reconsideration of the matter of embodiment altogether.Such concerns are addressed through a reading of the transsexual body via the work of Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler in the first part of the thesis. The second part develops the ideas stemming from these readings through the work of Angela Carter with a particular focus on embodiments of woman/hood in Nights at the Circus and The Passion ofNew Eve. Carter's interest in the material conditions of woman, her concern with 'demythologising' women, as well as the bodily resistance— the body's resistance to be consumed by and within discursive powers—embodied in her work, serve as the space for a re-examination of the role of the body in the development of gender subjectivity.