Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Claudia Lindner Leporda ( Roehampton University, English Literature, London,
United Kingdom)
Binocular Genders, Stereoscopic Vision
Societal gender roles do not easily permit a ‘territory between’ placing too much
weight on the end destinations of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Yet, does anyone fi t the
description of being completely male or female ? Are we not always embodied,
rather, somewhere in-between, on our journey towards becoming male or female,
while perhaps gravitating more to one gender than to the other ? Using the term ‘to
traverse’ as a fi ne-tuning instrument for my ongoing exploration of ‘genders’, my paper
focuses on Brigid Brophy’s novel In Transit ( 1969 ), which un-dresses constructions
of gender and interrogates the mechanisms of gender representation from within.
In the international terminal of an airport, a no-place, an elsewhere, with its undifferentiated
linguistic space, Brophy’s traversing-between-genders fi gure, Patrick/
Patricia ( the novel’s bifocal, bivocal, bisexual narrator ), deliberately decides to miss
the plane for which she/he has a ticket. Rather than speaking from a fi rm platform
of identity, Brophy satirizes the laziness of gender conventions, leaving opposing
concepts ‘in transit’, in the in-between dialogue with one another. In my analysis, ‘to
traverse’ defi nes alternations, movements, developments of meanings which take
place as a result of travels and shift s between the poles of masculinity and femininity.
‘Traversing genders’ is not so much an identity as a narrative, a journey and a story of
crucial bodily landmarks.
Email claudia_leporda@yahoo.co.uk
Section Traveling, Gender, Sexuality
Panel 23
Date July 28
Time 16 :45
Location l 113