Both/and aesthetics: Gender, art, and language in brigid Brophy's in transit and ali Smith's how to be both

Abstract

This essay reads Brigid Brophy's 1969 novel In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel alongside How to Be Both (2014), by the Scottish writer Ali Smith. It argues that the literary and sexual-political preoccupations of Brophy's text are in great measure consistent with those that contemporary writers such as Smith are currently exploring. In particular, Brophy's work anatomizes the artificial relationship between sex and gender, the dominance of heterosexual narratives and their relation to pornography, and the ways in which art, music, and language mediate concepts of gender. The essay will provide an in-depth comparative analysis of In Transit and How to be Both to show how both writers refuse binary oppositions in a “both/and” writing practice that is simultaneously self-consciously aesthetic and political.