“Gender Fluidity and Narrative Experimentation in Post-Millennial English Novels”

Abstract

The novel English novels that have emerged after the millennial era have seen tremendous changes in how gender is represented as well as an occurrence of the refiguration of the structure of the narrative. Since the binaries are becoming less rigid, and the fiction written today tends to pre-empt gender fluidity as both ominous and aesthetic issue. The paper considers the ways non-binary, transgender, and fluid identities are being codified in the English-language novels since 2000 using different narrative techniques. The analysis of such works as Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Orlando by Shola von Reinhold, Nevada by Imogen Binnie and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi is proven to be the literature equivalents of detached narrative, focalization, metafictional elements and relationship to time. By arguing that narrative experimentation is not just a stylistic but also an epistemological phenomenon involving challenges to heteronormativity permeated in conventional storytelling, the research makes this claim. The paper has placed the texts in the framework of modern gender theory and postmodern aesthetics in order to address how English post-millennial novels undermine the subjectivity which is unchanging and create literature as a place of multiplicity, transformation, and opposition.