Beyond Biological Determinism: Gender as Literary Performativity in Select Transnational Works

Abstract

Literature across genres provides fertile ground for examining the intersections of gender and narrative. Writers often deploy gender as a lens through which roles, identities, and experiences are articulated, thereby reflecting and reshaping social perceptions of masculinity, femininity, and non-binary subjectivities. In contexts of migration, literary characters negotiate gender roles within unfamiliar cultural terrains, revealing how transnational identities are performed and contested. This article analyses two diasporic novels-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun-through Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity as articulated in Gender Trouble. It argues that gender is not an inher…