"Gender fiction": critiquing performativity and queerness in Orlando

This paper initially uses Judith Halberstam’s notion of “gender fiction”—which typically “indicates the futility of stretching terms like lesbian or gay or straight or male or female across vast fields of experience, behavior, and selfunderstanding” (Halberstam 1994, 210)—as a framework for analysing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In doing this, I examine two ways that Woolf can be read as engaging with notions of gender performativity as a means of “queering” the text. That is, by mocking “gender” as a scripted identity, Woolf also mocks, by extension, the heterosexuality these stereotypes enforce. Of course, by deconstructing the normativity of these identity scripts, Woolf implicitly constructs a non-normative narrative space that allows for the representation of nonheterosexual, or “queer,” desire. By rejecting stylised gender identities (achieved largely through her extravagant engagement with early “sexual inversion” theories), Woolf instead asserts a “sexual identity [which] is always fluid, evanescent and subject to change” (Joannou 1995, 118); a sexual identity which is, largely, “queer.”