ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

performative in a Butlerian sense, but a sense that is particularized to narrative. Butler
clarifies her definition of gender performativity in order to repudiate what she sees as
a misunderstand of her use of the term:
The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender
is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that
one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a ‘one’
who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender
and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. (Butler
21)
Instead, Butler argues, “Gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulator
regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under
constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment operate in
the ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized
scene of gender construction and destabilization” (Butler 21). In Transit’s
narrator/protagonist(s) is not capable of deciding his or her gender—instead, gender is
something that must be epistemologically determined, according to a given set of
criteria. In the novel’s second half, this protagonist will undergo multiple instances of
gender construction and destabilization, according to outside constraints. These
constraints, however, are not purely social. 33 Instead, the constraints are particularly
genre constraints, as Brophy investigates the ways particular gender roles are
embedded in—and perhaps created by—particular literary (and other artistic)
conventions. That is, in the postmodernist second half of Brophy’s novel, literary
33 Although it is particularly notable that social constraints prevent the narrator from determining his or
her gender in the novel’s first half: Pat is constrained from taking off his or her clothes in public.
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