Reclaiming the Status of Human: Gender and Protest in Zoë Wicomb’s Short Stories

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study of Wicomb's fiction, I investigate the depiction of women's oppression and resistance in three short stories from You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away. Judith Butler's model of gender performativity and Susan Bordo's work on the socio-historical construction of female bodies provide a useful framework within which to examine how “coloured” women in Wicomb's fiction are socialised to perform a version of “ideal” femininity under the heteronormative male gaze, which is often also informed by sexism and racism. I argue that, as a result of their subjection to an objectifying male gaze and the perpetual threat or incident of gender failure, the central characters in “When the Train Comes”, “Friends and Goffels”, and “Mrs Pringle's Bed” encounter repeated dehumanisation and humiliation. The protagonists’ failure or conscious refusal to perform normative white femininity, however, opens up a space for resistance in which they are able to defy patriarchal control and assert their agency. Appropriating Butler's terminology, I refer to these instances of opposition as moments of “psychic excess”, by which I mean the subversion of the heteronormative. Ultimately, I show how the women in all three short stories harness the subversive power of psychic excess by employing it as a means of protest against the restrictions of normative femininity and, in so doing, recover a sense of their humanity.