The Subversion Of Gender Identity

Angela Carter is one of the greatest British original writers in the late 20th century, known for the originality of her works and writing style, which is a mixture of magical realism, Gothic, surrealism, feminism, postmodernism, etc.. The novel under study here is The Passion of New Eve, Carter's seventh novel, set in a dystopian United States in Civil War. In the novel, Carter boldly plays with the existing dichotomy between sex and gender, and presents us a chaotic world with the conflicts between different political, racial and gendered groups. Through the textual analysis of the protagonist Evelyn's changing cognition of gender identity before and after the sexual reassignment, the forcible regulation and shaping of gender identity in Zero's male-dominated Kingdom, and Tristessa's drag performance, the thesis explores the nature and deconstruction of traditional biological determinist gender identity, and for the first time illustrates the subversion of gender identity in the novel from the social constructionist perspective of postmodern feminism. By especially employing a major postmodern feminist, Judith Butler's theory of performativity of gender identity, the thesis argues that Carter subverts the gender identity and proves that both sex and gender are sustained, repeated social performance and can be socially constructed.