Other Sexes

In 1929, Virginia Woolf used the phrase "other sexes" to point out the dire need to expand our way of thinking about sexual difference. The fiction studied here does just that, by sketching the contours of a world where genders, sexes, and sexualities proliferate and multiply. Focusing on a selection of novels by Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Hauser, and Jeanette Winterson--novels that cross conventional boundaries between British and American, modern and postmodern, canonical and non-canonical--Andrea L. Harris argues that there is a continuum in these novelists' investigations of gender. Taking as theoretical models Judith Butler's theory of performative gender and Luce Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, Harris analyzes increasingly more radical challenges to the notion of two sexes and two genders throughout the twentieth century.