Gender-queere Perspektiven auf Raum-Zeit-Konstellationen in der Literatur: Virginia Woolfs Orlando

Abstract

Abstract This paper takes its cue from research on the social production of space and time in recent decades and outlines major feminist and queer perspectives emanating from this field of investigation and their productivity for cultural and literary studies (Part 1). Part 2 offers a gender-queer reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. A Biography (1928) based on the concepts and ideas presented in the first section. It shows how Woolf’s experimental take on time, space and gender exposes the patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings of Victorian biographical writing and projects a performative notion of gender that refutes the gender essentialism still prevalent in her day. The concluding part (Part 3) considers the literary text itself as a heterotopia in the sense of a counter-site that can critically reflect the norms of existing spaces and open up alternative worlds of being for the reader to inhabit.