Gender and sexuality

This chapter examines the representation of gender and sexuality in Scottish fiction from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period. It traces in the fiction a trajectory that foregrounds the challenging and dissolving of the boundaries that conceptually divide and fix genders and sexualities, and explores the transformative literary strategies that attend this troubling of heteronormativity. The chapter intends a more targeted analysis to examine the innovative literary representations that have effectively constructed a critique of hegemonic conceptions of gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary Scottish fiction. It also traces a course in Scottish fiction towards the radical anti-essentialism of late twentieth-century theories such as Butler's influential undoing of gender identity and the normative vectors of sexual desire where both gender and sexuality are ongoing performative productions never concluded.