Gender Identity In Carter's The Passion Of New Eve

In The Passion of New Eve, Evelyn, highly patriarchal professor, who mistreats a young girl, is kidnapped and transformed into a woman by Mother, the queen goddess of the desert. After mimicry, Eve undergoes a process of changing his gender from male to female. The fascinating story reflects Carter’s view that gender is performative. To illustrate gender as a set of repetitive performance and has little to do with biological sex, Carter creates a all-woman city, Beulah. The women living in Beulah are not necessarily born female, that is, they also become women through various procedures. Eve, who was born male, serves as a typical example of gender identity is performative. After being kidnapped, Evelyn goes through his transformation from man to woman, undergoing a series of surgeries. “She’s (Mother) going to castrate you, Evelyn, and then excavate what we call the

92). In Unlike Carter, who explains gender as performativity through describing how Eve and Tristessa do their gender by repetitively perform their gender identities, le Guin introduces an ambisexual world and from the other side indicates that the performance that is not repetitive could not be understood as gender. As there is no fixed gender among the Gethenians, there are also no fixed gender roles. One can be both a mother and a father at different periods in their lives which means that bearing and rearing of children is a shared responsibility rather than being just the responsibility of a woman: “No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more” (le Guin, 1997, p. 91). Therefore, the reimagining of gender system shows that the Gethenians are “agenders” because their performance of gender is not repetitive. Le Guin, from another angle, supports Butler’s performativity