Girl Meets Boy Analysis

Performativity either places the individual within the system or outside of it. Similarly, through metamorphosis, the individual no longer belongs to a well-defined group. Smith, however, puts a more positive twist on the concept of metamorphosis by reworking it to emphasise its potential of creating new identities. Her book takes the traditional heterosexual romance story the title misleadingly points to and transforms it into “a story of gender mixing and fluidity” (Mitchell, 68). At the same time, Robin – the “boy” in question – doesn’t seem to get a determinate gender throughout the story (“I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy” (Smith 103)), but exists in this new space the title creates, at the intersection of genders. Girl Meets Boy is thus made concrete in Robin’s character, and her identity becomes what is perceived as a constant crossing of the boundary between genders. “To be is simply to be changeable, transient” (Mitchell, 67) is what the text seems to say. Smith will, therefore, employ metamorphic imagery in this new exploration and understanding of gender and sexual fluidity, using Ovid’s eighth

Mitchell points out that this sort of language “eschews the logic of penetrating/ penetrated (and thus, by extension, of masculine/ feminine)”, that it “renders the body liquid, malleable but forceful”, that it presents a “body dissolved in desire, the boundaries between bodies likewise dissolving.” (Mitchell 70). Changing shape and form, both active and passive, doing away with masculine/ feminine logic, water – as symbol for metamorphosis – illustrates Smith’s (and Butler’s) critique of a binary division of gender, allowing for a more indeterminate