Sexual Stereotypes and the Modern Slovenian Novel

Abstract

In the modern Slovenian novel (1990–2007), the creative and functional dynamics of sexual stereotypes are characterized by a new emotionality and a feeling for shifts in sexual identity. In the new emotionality, links to traditional literature are present in the form of disassembling, rearrangement, and re-evaluation of literary schematisms and automatisms, among which sexual stereotypes predominate. In the modern Slovene novel (Filio ni doma [Filio Is Not Home], Muriša, Camera obscura, Nespečnost [Insomnia], Angeli in volkovi [Angels and Wolves], and Ime tvoje zvezde je Bilhadi [The Name of Your Star Is Bilhadi]), these stereotypes were decisively influenced by the global sexual stereotype of “the man is the head, and the woman is the heart” with its forced discriminating binariness, which is broken down into the following sexual stereotypes: the woman as dark continent, the woman as house angel, femme fatale, femme fragile, Don Juan, and the man as family protector. Among these, the dark continent has the broadest semantic field, which introduces the issues of understanding femininity, but at the same time, and in combination with the house angel and femme fatale, this stereotype is the most frequent in the modern Slovene novel. In the modern Slovenian novel, sexual stereotyping, the process of generalizing genders or gender roles establishes itself at various levels, most frequently at the level of characterization. The most traditional stereotype image of the male and female genders among the novels selected has been outlined in the novels Muriša by Feri Lainšček and Camera obscura by Nejc Gazvoda. When both writers failed to establish a narrative distance to sexual stereotypes, stereotyping at the level of characterization was also transferred to other narrative levels – that is, it weakened the sequence of events, the plot structure, and the narrative perspective. Sexual stereotypes were more successfully broken by the authors in the novels Filio ni doma and Nespečnost because they reshaped them with humor, irony, and the grotesque in the sense of post-postmodernist aesthetics. A special alienation of sexual stereotypes in the novels Angeli in volkovi and Ime tvoje zvezde je Bilhadi was enabled by the chronotopic shift and the children’s perspective, which retained partial stereotyping at the level of characterization known for its non-sexism and reaching beyond the traditional mental horizon.