ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article explores the postmodern narrative of the female subject in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Russ criticizes the female subject defined by society’s patriarchal ideologies, proclaiming that gender dichotomy, such as women and men and femininity and masculinity, are neither natural nor essential. In addition, she insists that there is no single definition of gender identity, showing that the lives and consciousness structures of women are organized differently based on their social and cultural situations. She deconstructs the female ego using a nonlinear and fractional narrative structure to tell the stories of the four female characters from parallel worlds that differ in terms of time and space, including a utopia, a dystopia, and the present world. She also creates a new female subject. Russ’s postmodern female subject is an anti-differential, constructivist, and fluid subject with various interconnected meanings and changes. Overall, the postmodern narrative of The Female Man is produced through a fluid, divisive subject and a fragmentary narrative in order to create new possibilities and space for the female subject.

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