Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

theory approaches to female sexuality, Claire O’Callaghan’s chapter, “‘Lesbo Victorian Romp’: Women, Sex and Pleasure in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet,” examines the way Waters’s neo-Victorian novel of the late 1990s queers the traditional form of the bildungsroman through its representation of a lesbian protagonist and her journey of sexual and self-discovery. O’Callaghan argues that the novel may be read in terms of Angela Carter’s notion of “moral pornography” and that articulating and affirming lesbian eroticism and carnality, serve effectively to critique heteropatriarchy and its regime of truth.

Helen Davies’s chapter contests accusations of homophobia and gender essentialism in the fiction of Will Self. By focusing on two of Self’s novels, Cock and Bull (1992) and Dorian (2002), Davies invokes the work of Butler and Foucault to suggest that the author’s intentionally hyperbolic representations of queer promiscuity serve to centralize the redundancy of stereotypes surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation. She draws on Butler to demonstrate how gender in Self’s work is discursively constructed through performative reiteration, yet suggests that the liberatory potential of performativity is largely dependent on the subjectivity of the reader, concluding that the subversion of normative scripts is an inherently ambivalent enterprise.

In her chapter on the novel Cereus Blooms at Night by the Trinidadian-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo, Mridula Chakrabarty examines how Mootoo’s characters in an Asian-Caribbean community in a fictional town on the island of Lantanacamara negotiate between a colonial legacy of subject-formation around normative racial, sexual, and gendered categories and their own sexual desires. Chakrabarty centralizes the politics of queer embodiedness and non-naming in what she calls Mootoo’s “revolutionary eroticism.” In exploring the possibilities for practices and being opened up by queerness, she shows how Mootoo’s novel unsettles naming in an attempt to move beyond both the known and the unspeakable to gesture towards a possible “queer paradise.”