Gender Trouble In Nella Larsen's Passing From The Perspective Of Gender Performativity

As the first African-American woman awarded with Guggenheim Foundation creative scholarship and an eminent figure in Harlem Renaissance,Nella Larsen is noted for her masterpiece Passing that depicts the mulattoes' identity crisis.Ostensibly the story is about the tragic mulatto Clare Kendry's passing for white,but underneath the veneer of that “safe”story about racial passing is a more “dangerous” story — though not named explicitly — of the three African-American characters' inevitable gender passing and identity searching.The same-sex relationship between the main characters in Passing has aroused some scholars' interest.The ambiguous relationship between the two African-American women Irene and Clare has drawn some analytical attention because of its hint about lesbian desire.Besides,the hero Brian's indeterminate sexual orientation is also associated with homosexuality.However,the gender trouble the characters in Passing are confronted with has seldom been elaborated with Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity which repudiates the ontological view of gender identity,or rather,the normative binary and hierarchical configurations of the relationship between sex,gender and desire,and claims that gendered subject comes into being through repeated citation of gender norms.Based on gender performativity,this thesis attempts to expound on the performativity of gender and sexual orientation in Passing and unearth the cultural and political factors that contribute to the construction of the African Americans' gender identity.The characters in Passing suffer from gender identity crisis.The racial crisis people in the 1920s' America were mired in aggravates the desperate plight of the African Americans with gender trouble.In search of their gender identity,the characters perform various gender roles and constantly regulate gender identification and sexual preference,which includesClare's gender passing,Irene's gender adhesion and Brian's sexual repression.Irene has almost adhered to social norms all through her performativity of gender and sexual orientation.She dutifully performs the traditional gender role of an asexual housewife imposed on the middle-class African-American women,though Irene is an androgynous householder.In fact,Irene is a firm advocate of bourgeois respectability who internalizes middle-class morality.Therefore,she narrates lesbian desire in the discourse of race and finally eradicates it by the murder of Clare in the name of bourgeois respectability.And Brian is a feminine man who pursues a sense of belonging and security through bisexuality.Brian performs the role of a considerate husband well.Nevertheless,he is an indecisive man who is emasculated by racial discrimination.As a result,Brian is not quite interested in women and deems heterosexuality disappointing and a grand joke,though he has a respectable heterosexual marriage.Incapable of going to Brazil,a country where both the black and the homosexual are accepted,Brian has to seek a sense of belonging and security from sexual relationship.What's more,Clare's performativity of gender and sexual orientation takes place in a much more defiant gesture.Clare,a light-skinned African-American women,has passed for white for survival.In her heterosexual marriage with the white racist John Bellew,Clare plays the gender roles of angel in the house and erotic beauty,but she also possesses bisexual desire.To alleviate the loneliness and isolation she has been suffering in the white community,Clare flirts with white men around;due to the burden of racial passing and belief in black sisterhood,she runs after Irene and at the same time seduces black men.Eventually,by means of racial and gender passing,Clare acquires self-identification.Through an exploration into the characters' performativity of gender and sexual orientation with Butler's gender performativity in Passing,the thesis criticizes the outdated,binary representation of gender endowed by the compulsory heterosexual system.Actually,the portrait of the African Americans as sexually dissidents also manifests Larsen's concern about sexual and gender diversities.In the name of gender passing,Larsen explores the cognitive process of African Americans' gender identification,overturns the traditional gender binary and thus brings understanding and tolerance to people possessing unconventional gender and sexual identity.