ABSTRACT
Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body each negotiate what it means to transgress norms of gender and sexuality, and they deploy the tools of parody and satire to gesture towards their characters’ resistance to a dominant patriarchal system. This chapter asks whether Judith Butler’s concept of ‘gender parody’, designed to explore quotidian and onstage gender non-conformity, can be usefully adapted to examine literary texts, and develops the framework of textual drag to address the workings of gender non-conformity, gender parody, parody, and satire in these texts. Equally, as Monsieur Vénus, Orlando, and The Lesbian Body depict characters that trouble expectations for appropriate embodiment, desire, and conduct, the author contends that these works prefigure later queer and transfeminist insights into gender, sexuality, and performativity.
