Gender Performativity in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

Orlando's masculine identity is constituted through the repetition of his courageous feats of swordsmanship,his princely manners and his behaviour of a nobleman which are endowed by charismatic personality of his handsome body, his social position at the top of stratification hierarchy and his access to the privileges and power of the state. By contrast, reiteration of the conventional feminine norms of bursting into tears on slight provocation, feeling shocked at odd events and smiling involuntarily in vanity consolidate Orlando's feminine identity during the process of her becoming a woman which is geared up by her dressing in a complete outfit of an Englishwoman. What counts after all is that subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, Orlando's gender identity emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relationsthemselves.