Emma Parker

Money Makes the Man: Gender and Sexuality in Martin Amis’s Money

If, as the proverb states, money makes the man, then the denouement of Money (1984) calls the gender of its protagonist, John Self, into question by leaving him penniless. In this context, Amis’s assertion that Self’s financial downfall constitutes a “happy ending” suggests that the novel’s critique of capitalism is entwined with a critique of patriarchy (Haffenden, 14). Such a reading contradicts existing interpretations of the text that propose that it endorses male hegemony. Although it is possible to counter the charge that Amis is a masculinist writer by arguing that Money offers a critique of masculinity, this essay contends that the novel goes further than highlighting the need to redefine dominant modes of manhood. Offering a queer reading of the text that focuses on the unstable borders of identity and desire, this essay demonstrates that Money subverts the ideology of its bigoted protagonist by deconstructing the heteropatriarchal concepts “woman” and “man” and creating what Judith Butler terms “gender trouble.”

From House to Home: A Kristevan Reading of Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House

Abstract Women writers have a penchant for burning down paternal houses that do not offer their female protagonists satisfactory homes.1 In Daughters of the House, Michèle Roberts prefers to transform rather than destroy the house in which her two main female characters reside, a metaphor for the patriarchal symbolic order,2 and she attempts this through an exploration of the conditions Julia Kristeva calls abjection and estrangement. Roger Luckhursts recent reading of Daughters of the House points to the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights in reading Robertss text. His essay, like mine, focuses on the relationship between memory and history; but whereas Luckhurst uses theories of mourning and melancholia to discuss repressed histories, I want to use Kristevas theories of abjection and estrangement to explore the relationship between women and history and between femininity and repression from a woman-centered perspective.

The Real Thing: Transsexuality and Manhood in Rose Tremain's Sacred Country

OMMENTING on the medical establishment’s preference for designating intersex babies as girls rather than boys, a prominent surgeon once crudely quipped, ‘you can make a hole but you can’t build a pole’ (Fausto-Sterling 2000:59). Such a comment confirms Marjorie Garber’s assertion that in sex reassignment surgery ‘there remains an implicit privileging of the phallus, a sense that ‘a ‘‘real one’’ can’t be made, but only born’ (Garber 1992:104). Garber contends that ‘culture does not yet strongly support the construction of ‘‘real men’’ ’ by surgical means (Garber 1992:104), and the dominant order’s disavowal of female-to-male (FTM) transsexuality is reflected in the fact that there are few cultural representations of FTM, as opposed to MTF, transsexuals. Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country (1992), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger, traces the transition of its central character from Mary to Martin Ward and is significant both because it makes the FTM visible and because it subverts the myth that manhood is an inviolable state, or sacred country, inhabited by a privileged group of subjects: real men. However, rather than asserting the realness of the FTM, Tremain questions the very notion of the real. Inspired by queer theory’s critique of an ‘original and true sex’ (Butler 1990:viii), this essay proposes that Sacred Country affirms not the authenticity of transsexual manhood but C w E M M A P A R K E R .......................................................................................................

Joe Orton and Shakespeare: collage, class and queerness

Abstract This essay considers Joe Ortons relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwells neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeares themes and contest critical authority. By focusing specifically on Arden editions, Orton and Halliwell resist the gentrification of Shakespeare engendered by elitist academic discourse and bourgeois spaces such as the public library and the theatre. The same irreverent attitude to Shakespeare is evident in Ortons plays. Although he admired, identified with and drew inspiration from his predecessor, Orton recycles Shakespeares plots, lines and motifs to transform their class politics and to amplify their sexual dissidence. Overall, this essay contends that by reshaping Shakespeare from a working class, queer perspective Orton resists the Bards growing function as an emblem of social distinction in mid-century Britain.

Magic, diaspora, and klezbian desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist

This essay examines the ways in which magic articulates the traumatic effects and transformative potential of migration in Judith Katzs The Escape Artist, a novel that constructs a woman-centred and queer counter-history of the Jewish diaspora. It proposes that Katz employs the motif of vanishing tricks to explore the relationship between the trauma of migration and non-normative sexualities. Further, drawing on Terry Castles observation that, historically, lesbianism has appeared in culture only ‘as an absence, as chimera or amor impossibilia’ and Gayatri Gopinaths observation that non-normative genders and same-sex desire are rendered inconceivable by conventional models of diaspora, it argues that the conjuring and escapology practised by the novels two female protagonists represent a radical desire to achieve the impossible. Katzs cross-dressed magician and her assistant, who escapes the ‘white slave trade’, achieve this when they shatter the illusion of heteronormativity and take the mutually exclusive binary categories of gender to vanishing point. The novel also reconceives home and history from a post-Zionist, queer perspective. Elaborating on Jonathan Freedmans assertion that klezmer music represents the queer, the diasporic, and the Jewish, the essay thus proposes that The Escape Artist celebrates the subversive possibilities of a specifically ‘klezbian’ subjectivity and desire.

Michèle Roberts and Romance

This is an electronic version of an article published in Women: A Cultural Review, 2008, 19 (1), pp. 21-36. Women: A Cultural Review is available online at: www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0957-4042&date=2008&volume=19&issue=1&spage=21.

Male pregnancy and queer utopia in Paul Magrs's Could it be Magic?

Situating Paul Magrss Could it be Magic? (1997) in the context of historical and contemporary representations of male pregnancy, this essay argues that the novel employs the figure of the pregnant man as an avatar of queer futurity and, given the impossibility of same-sex reproduction, the embodiment of queer utopia. Reading the text as a response to the AIDS crisis and Thatcherism, it is proposed that the pregnant gay man refuses the dominant orders association of homosexuality with death while also offering a counterpoint to Lee Edelmans assertion that queer oppositionality can only be enacted through resistance to reproductive futurism. Through its focus on impoverished members of a deprived community in the north-east of England, Could it be Magic? resists the occlusion of class in queer scholarship and activism, and envisions a socialist as well as a queer utopia.

‘Odd girl out’: an interview with Valerie Mason-John, aka Queenie

This is an electronic version of an article published in Textual Practice, 2011, 25 (4), pp. 799-822. Textual Practice is available online at: www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1470-1308&date=2011&volume=25&issue=4&spage=799.

A career of one's own:christina rossetti, literary success and love

Abstract In this article it is proposed that the themes of loss and longing, which dominate the poetry of Christina Rossetti, relate less to love than to her ambitions and anxieties as a writer. By both drawing on and reassessing biographical studies of Rossetti, and by reading her poems in conjunction with details about the painful progress of her literary career, it is argued that Rossetti mimicked the conventional image of the Victorian lady poetess and employed the love lyric as a coded expression of her more subversive and unspeakable desire for literary success. The article focuses on the frustrations she encountered as a writer – including her relationship with her brother, Gabriel, and the repeated suppression or misprinting of her name – and suggests that the motifs of memory and death which pervade her poems bear witness to her ardent desire to be remembered and become immortalised in literary history. A poet traditionally associated with renunciation and passive endurance, even within feminist ...