Gender In Frankenstein

For Wittig, sex is also linguistically constructed and thus, she stresses the necessity of rejecting the universalized the grammar of gender that maintains the oppressive system of gender binarism. Referring to the mark of gender in French language, she explains that gender is normalized and naturalized through grammatical norms and thus, the conception of gender can be changed through the grammar that gendered being has recourse to. Accordingly, she puts emphasis on the necessity of creating a new language that rejects both the binary and essentializing grammatical restrictions on gender. In other words, in order to display the discursive practices of the patriarchal language that imposes strict gender categories through binary opposition.

Accordingly, canonical gothic narratives such as Shelly’s Frankenstein re-appear in new (re)visions, overtly displaying the Gothic’s diffusion over “a multiplicity of different genres and media,” to use Botting’s own words (Gothic 13). Then, Botting goes further to explain that with the rise of postmodern theories it seems increasingly difficult to speak of ‘the Gothic’ with any assurance,” instead we should speak about ‘Gothics’ (1). As a “hybrid form, incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing,” postmodern gothic crosses generic boundaries, opening up a fertile intertexual dialogue with other literary forms such as science-fiction. It is acutely this cross-fertilisation or what I will call “dialogic symbiosis” between the gothic and science-fiction that contributes to a generic hybridism which gives rise to a heterogeneous subgenre: the ‘Feminist Gothic Science-fiction’ that challenges the fixed of inter-disciplinary boundaries.

Jackson tries to fill the gaps of Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. She reveals that this structualist critic fails to “fails to consider the social and political implications of literary forms,” in a way that his theory remains “limited to the poetics of the fantastic” (). Thus, she tries to sensitize the reader of “the politics of its form” () maintaining that “[f]antasy violates the real, contravenes it, denies it, and insists on this denial throughout” (emphasis is mine).Gone is the idea of hesitation or ambiguity as the central aspect of