Houlden_2017.pdf (217.11 kB)
Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?
journal contribution
posted on 2023-08-30, 14:56 authored by Kate HouldenThis essay explores world-literary and queer approaches to Anna Kavan’s little discussed 1963 novel Who Are You?. It argues that world-literary scholarship demonstrates the centrality of white colonial masculinity to capitalist modernity, while a queer reading highlights the anxious performativity at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. What both fields add to the analysis of this formal deviation is a shared concern with the failings of normative order—whether that be the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal family or the capitalist system itself—and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.
History
Refereed
- Yes
Volume
28Issue number
4Page range
295-311Publication title
Women: A Cultural ReviewISSN
1470-1367External DOI
Publisher
Taylor & FrancisFile version
- Accepted version
Language
- eng