A third term : re-articulating gender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus.

Abstract

This essay argues that in order to challenge male hegemony and patriarchal values, Angela Carter deconstructs our current understandings of gender and re-articulates and re-conceptualizes gender as a third term that isn’t reproduced by prevailing social norms, gender discourses and existing fields of power relations. Carter conceives gender as a term that is non-essentialist, androgynous, performative, pluralistic and resistant to fixities. Through a close examination The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus, this essay aims to demonstrate how Carter repudiates prevailing conceptions of gender in both novel to forge an alternative gender apparatus through which we can understand the relations between men and women.