Beyond Binary Boundaries: Gender Performativity and Taboo in Alice Munro’s Short Fiction

Özet

This study examines how Alice Munro’s short fiction destabilizes heteronormative frameworks through the lens of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. The central focus lies in how Munro’s characters perform gender as a fluid, dynamic process that resists the limitations of the heterosexual matrix. Through close readings of selected stories from Runaway (2005) and Lives of Girls and Women (2015), the analysis explores how Munro’s protagonists subvert socially enforced norms, particularly those surrounding marriage, incest, and homosexuality. These moments of transgression illuminate the performative construction of normative gender identity and the disciplinary forces that regulate deviation. Framing Munro’s narratives within Butler’s theoretical model, this paper contributes to both Munro scholarship and gender studies by addressing a critical gap: the ways in which her fiction moves beyond feminist essentialism to engage with post structural conceptions of identity. It extends existing research by showing that Munro’s work not only critiques patriarchal structures but also offers a broader, more inclusive vision of subjectivity and desire, one that disrupts the binary logic underlying contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality.