“we have no choice left but confess – he was a woman”. Queering and theory-building potential in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando

Abstract

Virginia Woolf ’s novel Orlando (1928) impressively anticipates that becoming and being a woman (or a man) are cultural processes of inscription and internalization of gendered roles. Orlando miraculously changes their sex from male to female, and thus has to restart the process of ‘becoming’ a gender by developing a new gender and social identity. The novel drafts a performative gender concept that is characterized by inde"niteness in terms of content and narration, namely different devices of queering that are used to question and deconstruct heteronormative ideas of ‘normality’ and to capture the process of developing not only a different gender identity but a gender fluid identity with a number of selves. Identity is increasingly conceptualized independently from the body and as constituted by individual mental elements, memories, interactions, and situational behavior. The novel dissolves the entity of identity in favor of a pluralistic, dynamic, and processual concept of identity – and thus anticipates and narratively performs important 20th century post-modern and feminist discourses of subject, gender, and the complex construction of identity.