The Genderization of Narrative

Abstract

This article deals with three first-person narratives in which the biological sex of the narrator and, in two cases, that of one other character in the novel is indeterminate. It is argued, however, that in two of the texts (Maureen Duffy's Love Child and Anne Garréta's Le sphinx) the probable sex of the narrator can be inferred from the gender signals of the narrative, although no definite proof can be provided. In the third case, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, indeterminacy is even more pronounced, although here, too, an informed guess as to the sex of the narrator and that of A*** is made. The paper also presents the results of an empirical study conducted among students and faculty in which the gender attribution to the narrator and narratee-protagonist in Gabriel Josipovici's "The Bird Cage" was used as a test. Finally, a list of textual clues to the sex and/or gender of characters in fiction is provided

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