Offering a thorough introduction to notions of gender in contemporary global literature, Global Literature and Gender uses postcolonial theories alongside theories of space and place, theories of globalization, and reference to the Posthuman and the Anthropocene as competing narratives of the contemporary.
This book argues for the ongoing but very current significance of gender as an organizing category, while also revealing the fluidity and boundary defying nature of gender in twenty-first-century literature. Divided into three sections, looking at femininity, masculinity, and transgender, Jenni Ramone:
- Examines globalization’s uneasy relationship with theories which foreground gender and considers gender as a challenge to globalization;
- Analyses embodied labour, global travel, trade, and tourism;
- Discusses the ways in which globalization and masculinity are likewise at odds;
- Considers a diverse range of themes and genres, including pearl-diving, taxi driving, space travel, authorship, surrogacy, modern-day slavery, Afrofuturism, Objectophilia, Stigma, Dehumanisation, Passing, and romance tourism;
- Engages with a vast range of innovative contemporary works, including those by Akwaeke Emezi, Alain Mabanckou, Mieko Kawakami, Meera Syal, Helen Heath, Kei Miller, Deji Bryce Olukotun, jaye simpson, Hideki Noda, Dany Laferrière, Zadie Smith, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Teju Cole, Sherley Anne Williams, Helen Oyeyemi, and Arundhati Roy.
Global Literature and Gender is an essential intervention for researchers and students of globalization, twenty-first-century literature, and gender.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Twenty-First Century Global Literature and Gender
Chapter 1: Female Reproductive Labour: Mothering, Breastfeeding, Wetnursing, Surrogacy
Part 1: ‘Whose breasts are they?’: Breastfeeding, Wetnursing, and Ownership in Global Texts and Contexts
Part 2: Surrogacy and Stigma: Life, Death, and the Female Body
Chapter 2: Object(ification)s: Women as Objects / Women and Objects
Part 1: Objectification and Women Using Objects: Objects of Virginity, Fertility and Agency
Part 2: Woman with object: The Female Pearl Diver in her Village and the Global Trade in her Pearls
Chapter 3: Contingent Masculinities in Glocalization: Incarceration, Transport, and Delivery
Part 1: Waiting Rooms, Glocalization and Latent Masculinity
Part 2: Taxis, Deliveries, Spaceships, and Africanfuturism
Chapter 4: Island Identities, Trading, and Sex Tourism: Undoing Masculinities
Part 1: Trading: New Masculinities and Dany Laferrière’s I am a Japanese Writer
Part 2: Island Identities and Sex Tourism: Christian Campbell, ‘Groove’
Chapter 5: Transing: Twenty-first Century Global Texts ask ‘What if…?’ about (Trans)Gender
Part 1: Decolonising Trans(gender)
Part 2: Post-gender Potential and Precarity
Chapter 6: Boundary-Crossing and Transgender: Gender as Mobile
Part 1: Boundary-breaking, local non-binary gender, and Border-crossing in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Part 2: Passing and Located Transmasculinity in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird
Conclusion: Gender, the Anthropocene, and the Posthuman
Part 1: Pluralizing: Gendering the Anthropocene
Part 2: Tilting: The Gendered and Ungendered Posthuman
Glossary
Index
Biography
Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Previous books include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading (2020) and Postcolonial Theories (2011).
This is an exciting and innovative book, which considers a wonderful range of texts from across the globe. It has an especially welcome focus on embodiment, materiality and gendered labour, as well as human entanglements with the non-human. Ramone gives lots of space to transgender and genderqueer theoretical work, activist work and literatures and connects these in inventive ways to global changes in ideas about gender. Highly recommended. - Susan Watkins, Professor of Women’s Writing, Leeds Beckett University, UK
Global Literature and Gender is a pioneering work. Ramone is incisive in redirecting the study of global literature toward an underexplored focus on gender and sexuality as categories of investigation. She reveals the neocolonial restraints placed upon gendered subjects at the heart of our present moment of ‘post-gender’ neoliberal globalization. - Sheldon George, Simmons University, Boston, USA. Co-editor of Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation.
This feminist exploration of gender in global Anglophone literatures is fit for the twenty-first century: trans- and queer-inclusive, ethnically diverse, intersectional. Ramone’s study is dazzling in its range; despite its use of the term ‘global’, it is indebted to postcolonial and decolonial thought. - Alberto Fernández Carbajal (they/them), University of Roehampton, London, UK.
Global Literature and Gender: 21st Century Perspectives is a compelling and stimulating examination of literary representations of feminine, masculine, transgender and genderqueer identities across the world. Foregrounding the fluid, contingent, and entangled nature of gender, Jenni Ramone’s critical comparative approach and willingness to use translated texts reflect her keen awareness of how expressions of gender in specific local contexts such as the hijra in India or women pearl divers in Japan have global significance by expanding our horizons of possibility. Theoretically informed yet scrupulously historicist, Ramone’s book breaks new ground in its configuration of gender-related concerns as seemingly disparate as breastfeeding, sexual slavery, care work, and posthuman futures. It is a must-read for the way it challenges readers to re-consider normative ways of thinking about both gender and the nature of global literature. - Angelia Poon, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Accessible and informed by contemporary critical debates, Ramone’s compelling book analyses global literary representations of femininity, masculinity, and transgender/genderqueer identities which defy fixity and explore contingency. This wide-ranging, ambitious study is a must-read for contemporary literature and gender scholars. - Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire, UK.
Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives compellingly engages global textual approaches to reveal how embodied labour is dependent on highly fluid and unstable assemblages of gender dynamics. In pursuing an articulation of gender that is contingent on its specificity, Ramone embraces a definition of the global that is truly inclusive. - Anastasia Valassopoulos, University of Manchester, UK.
Global Literature and Gender makes an important intervention at a time when none of our assumptions about gender can stand unexamined. It offers lively engagement with a diverse set of texts, thorough command of the relevant theories, and a refreshing analysis of the key debates. - Leila Kamali, Author of The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000.
