Gender Performativity and Women’s Resistance in The Blue Aubergine

Abstract

The current article reads The Blue Aubergine through Judith Butler’s articulation of gender performativity, and how Nada’s passage through adolescence serves to signal the constructed nature of femininity in postcolonial Egyptian society. Building on Butler’s (1990, 1993) Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter respectively, the analysis examines how Nada’s nascent sexuality and corporeal awakening are disciplined through religious, familial and institutional practices that reiterate paternalistic regulation. Her ironic play with traditional symbols of femininity: clothing, modesty, and bodily comportment, exposes gender as a performative act never wholly unconstrained from scrutiny. Also, though suppressed, Nada’s bodily desires stay as a subversive undercurrent that undermines the firm scripts that compel her. Through reading Butler alongside textual instances from al-Tahawy’s novel, this research maintains that Nada’s affective resistance, silenced and internal as it may be, works to erode the myth of a coherent, naturalized female subject. This subversion of normative sexual individuality places Nada at the borders of both her gendered expectations and patriarchal society. By exploring the faultlines in desire, shame and the gaze of authority in Nada’s story, The Blue Aubergine exposes the fractures within Egypt's paternal symbolic order and demonstrates how gender performativity also becomes a locus of subjectivation.