Of Epicene Particles and Other Misleading Tricks

“Carta perdida en un cajón” [Letter lost in a drawer] is a paradigmatic example of simultaneous ambiguities at work in Silvina Ocampo’s fiction (1903–1993). In this short story published in 1959, pronouns and shifters, as well as endings that mark gender cooperate to erase certainties and make the reader actively seek clues to understand the exchange the short story sets up. By scrutinizing its manuscript, I examine Ocampo’s writing and revision strategies and elaborate on some of her creative processes in her search for ambiguity. Through five key compositional moves I have identified in her manuscripts, my essay focuses on how Ocampo revises and ramps up the writerly effect of gender ambiguity that allowed the construction of queer identities in her fiction. I argue that the insertion of epicene particles and insults — which are less common in Spanish than gendered ones — , added at later stages of revision, demonstrate the intentional pursuit of a reading marked by confusion around the depiction of a non-normative desire. Genetic criticism allows us to reveal the painstaking process by which queer desire nudges its way into expression.

Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

The Gender Ambiguity of Fertilization

SummaryThe role of women in the processes of fertilization and procreation in ancient Egypt has been traditionally regarded as passive. This article sets out to challenge this view, by introducing the new evidence that the study of the Hemusets provide. The Hemusets have been largely neglected by the Egyptological scholarship, and consequently, their important contribution to the discussion of fertilization is still ignored, but this research examines for the first time their relevant textual and iconographic sources. This investigation shows that the Hemusets are involved in the creation of food and provision of fertility for both lands and humans. Furthermore, the sexual ambiguity of their iconography, and their chthonic nature frames them in a broader Mediterranean context of androgynous creative goddesses.

‘Me and Not-Me’: Folk Songs, Narrative Perspectives, and The Gender Imaginary in Angela Carter’s Shadow Dance

It is a little-known fact that Angela Carter was a traditional folk singer during the 1960s, that she played the English concertina, and that she co-founded a folk club in Bristol with her first husband, Paul Carter. A newly unearthed private archive of her folk song notes from the decade, which includes her musical notations and a recording of her singing, allows us to develop new understandings of her folk praxis and, when laid alongside her private journal entries, the folk album sleeve notes she penned, her undergraduate dissertation, and other unpublished papers, a whole host of possible new readings of her literary work emerges. This essay explores just one: gender fluidity in folk song performance and its impact upon Carter’s interpretations of gender identity in her debut novel, Shadow Dance. I will suggest that Carter learned gender ambiguity from her folk singing, and that her experience of singing afforded her freedoms to explore versions of sexual performance and gendered selfhood through male characters. More broadly, I will suggest that she buried musical folk song features into the structures of her writing to present her prose as a form of audial performance.