Gender Identity and Modern Slovenian Novel

Abstract

Currently gender identity is more and more at the center of issue of identity. In the scientific discourse it is embodied in the modern thesis of the gender theory thesis, in which gender is perceived as a construct, a continuously changing category and performance. Judith Butler, an important researcher of gender identity, suggests that all of us emulate “our true sex”, convinced that we model ourselves on an original ideal, although the original itself is already a parody of the idea of the natural and original. – Gender identity in the modern Slovenian novel of recent years (1990–2005) is x-rayed through the progress of a personal or intimate story, which is a shared characteristic of most recent Slovenian novels. Stories portray changes in gender identity through the binarism of the heterosexual matrix (issues of sexual minorities are very rare – homosexual themes appear in the novels Zgubljena zgodba (The Lost Story), Angeli (Angels) and Ime mi je Damjan (My Name Is Damjan) – while homosexual motifs are somewhat more common), which is questioned by stereotypes of femininity and masculinity: woman, the dark continent; woman, the angel in the house; woman, the femme fatale; and man, the Don Juan. The most prevalent is the first stereotype, which is also linked to the image of the femme fatale (e.g. in the novels Ki jo je megla prinesla (Brought by the Fog), Volčje noči (The Nights of the Wolves), Kraljeva hči (The King’s Daughter), Igra angelov in netopirjev (The Game of Angels and Bats), Galilejev lestenec (The Chandelier of Galileo), Carmen (Carmen), Tek za rdečo hudičevko (Running After the Red She-Devil), Kalipso (Calypso)), where one can recognize the phantasm of the male erotic imagination, and, above all, the male literary character’s fear of an individualist woman. In times of transformed gender roles, woman is no longer the angel in the house (e.g. Vladarka (The Empress), Črni angel, varuh moj (My Black Guardian Angel), Tao ljubezni (The Tao of Love), Noč v Evropi (A Night in Europe), Kalipso (Calypso)), but since she is dominated by the enigma of her own and the opposite sex, she becomes, in a world of “empty existence”, a prisoner of her own freedom and her (still traditional) image of men. – Two important innovations in the most recent Slovenian novels have to do with gender identity, which becomes (through a love story) the core of identity issues. The first innovation regards narrative: a higher percentage of leading female characters, also as a result of the greater number of female novelists, bring to the worlds of novels a diversity of gender perspective and motifs. If men experience female characters as a conjunction of too low (a woman as an in stinctive and unequal being) and too high expectations (a woman as an ethereal, ideal being), female characters are more preoccupied with images of their own gender, although they are also interested in men, particularly as friends and lovers. The verbalization of the inter-sexual communication barrier denotes a new type of honesty, in which becoming familiar with your own gender means being open to the other. When such an honesty exposes the repression of the heterosexual matrix with a humorous, ironic, or parodic distance, it tends towards a new emotionality, a particular emotional mood in texts characterized by the auto-reflexivity of its own (novelistic) sentiment and subtle intellectuality.