Rachel Carroll

Retrospective Sex: Rewriting Intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenidess Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex . It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenidess narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanidess intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.

Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go

Contemporary debate and speculation about the prospect of reproductive cloning reveals the way in which such beings, as ‘copies’ of human originals, challenge notions of the human, especially in relation to issues of individuality, authenticity and origin. This article explores the representation of human cloning in Kazuo Ishiguros speculative fiction, Never let me go, published in 2005. It investigates the possibility that Ishiguros exploration of the contingency of human identity has a significant, if oblique, relationship to heteronormative constructions of heterosexuality and the human. In order to trace how a fiction of human cloning might give rise to questions of heteronormativity, I will foreground issues of reproduction and their relationship to normative constructions of heterosexuality. The controversies prompted by the potential prospect of reproductive human cloning can be attributed in part to the ways in which it challenges the heterosexual prerogative to reproduction; I aim to situate human cloning within the context of other technologies of assisted reproduction and to theorise its challenge to the heterosexual prerogative to reproduction within feminist and queer frameworks.

“Something to See”: Spectacle and Savagery in Leonora Carrington's Fiction

Abstract The surrealism of Leonora Carringtons fiction is informed by the fantastic creatures and enchanted landscapes of her more celebrated visual art. but her writing, which is at once whimsical and macabre, also takes its place in an eclectic tradition of literary transgression.

‘Making the blood flow backwards': disability, heterosexuality and the politics of representation in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending

In Julian Barness 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, the discovery of a forgotten letter prompts the narrator, Tony Webster, to reconsider the suicide of a brilliant school friend, Adrian Finn. The dramatic revelation of the existence of Finns adult son (also called Adrian), borne of an extra-marital affair with his girlfriends mother, is presented as offering a possible answer to the mystery of Finns death. In this context, this article seeks to examine the representation of Finns adult son as a person with a learning disability. In their book, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder critically examine the uses to which disability is put in narrative; this article will focus on the ways in which cognitive impairment is constructed in this novel. Depictions of disability in The Sense of an Ending will be situated within the context of representations of heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female sexuality; employing critical frameworks informed by both feminist and disability studies, this article will investigate the relationship between disability, maternal sexual transgression and discourses of normativity as represented in Barness novel.

Coming Soon . . . Teaching the Contemporaneous Adaptation

A range of pedagogic, disciplinary, and institutional factors can inform the construction of a curriculum for a course on film and television adaptations; among these factors, the availability of published scholarship on the set texts (whether literary, film, or television) may be a key concern for tutors, students, and validating committees alike. These pressures might mean that in some circumstances those adaptations that have attracted significant academic interest are more likely to be adopted than those that have been overlooked, and in this way emerging canons can become self-perpetuating (see Cobb, this volume). Of course, the very notion of the canon has been critically contested and its potential complicity in hierarchies of cultural power and value interrogated, especially in relation to gender, class, and race. However, questions of canon persist, and perhaps especially so when a field of study is relatively new and where the existence of a demonstrable canon might be seen as a necessary condition for disciplinary credibility. In this context it may seem perverse to focus on adaptations which, by definition, offer no supporting critical apparatus. This chapter seeks to explore the value and benefits of teaching contemporaneous adaptations, by which I mean film or television adaptations whose release or broadcast is concurrent with the delivery of the teaching programme; it will do so through a focus on a specific case study in pedagogic practice — an active learning strategy presented under the title of ‘Adaptation Watch’.1