Gender Performativity In Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy

Another example of an author who plays with the idea of gender performativity is Ali Smith in her novel Girl Meets Boy. The character of Robin is described as such:

Smith has turned the gender construction made by society on its head in this paragraph where she has switched the roles of the genders as constructed by society, and she does this by describing one as the other and vice versa. The main character Anthea instantly falls in love with Robin, although she upon first glance believes her to be a boy. Anthea’s sister, Imogen, sees that Robin is a girl, but not because of her choice of clothing or her body language, but rather in the performative acts that supposedly constitutes her gender. Smith plays with the idea of what elements makes a girl a girl and what makes a boy a boy; she toys with the

Smith makes the reader question whether gender is merely biological or, like Butler argues, if it is a performance put on day to day because it is how society has constructed us to act. Robin is in the novel the manifestation of everything society would label a boy, yet her biological sex is a girl. Smith writes that Robin makes love like both a girl and a boy, and by doing this emphasises that love is not gendered.

As opposed to Smith’s Girl Meets Boy where the social construction of gender is picked apart and put together again in a different way, The Handmaid’s Tale makes it clear that the society of Gilead’s view of gender heavily relies on their sex, and that love is indeed gendered. Atwood begins her novel, primarily focusing on the actions and attitudes of females, by describing how women have evolved from the earlier ages. She continues to identify the changes, as “felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.” As mentioned earlier about Butler’s theory, gender is not a starting point, but an identity that is repeatedly constructed through