Violent Operations: Revisiting the Transgendered Body in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

Jul 3, 2026

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Explores how transgender identity is framed within queer theory and how these frameworks reshape readings of Angela Carter’s 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve. Drawing on Jay Prosser and Judith Halberstam, it examines the tension between treating the transgendered body as a key queer trope versus foregrounding the materiality and integrity of sexed bodies. It links Second Wave feminist critiques of femininity with later queer debates, including gender performativity and “Butlerification,” while highlighting complications in recuperating Carter through queer theory.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time35 min

Critical evaluation of Carter’s queer recuperation

Feminist politics and the transgendered identity

Gender crossing, performativity, and “Butlerification”

Prosser’s materiality critique and debates on performativity

‘Violent operations’: Revisiting the transgendered body in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser foregrounds the ways in which the transgendered subject has been figured as a ‘key queer trope,’1 playing such a prominent role in the dissemination of queer theory as to serve as ‘the most crucial sign of queer sexuality’s aptly skewed point of entry into the academy.’2 Elsewhere Judith Halberstam illustrates the way in which the transgendered subject seems to embody key concepts for queer theory: ‘the split between sex and gender which is so readable within the transgender or transsexual body reveals the constructedness of all sex and gender [emphasis added] .’3 The transgendered figure, it seems, has come to stand for queer theory and, hence, the presence of transgender themes within a literary text has sometimes been read as a kind of embodied shorthand for a queer intent. In this context, this article seeks to critically evaluate the queer recuperation of Angela Carter’s fiction, with a focus on the tensions between feminist politics and transgendered identity in her 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve. As Joanne Hollows has written,‘for many second-wave feminists femininity was self-evidently problematic’ and its critique ‘fundamental to understanding women’s oppression;’4 indeed, the exposure of femininity as a patriarchal construction-from Kate Millett’s ‘interior colonisation’(1977) to Mary Daly’s ‘man-made’women (1979) 1 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p.5. 2 Jay Prosser, ‘Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex,’ The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York and London: Routledge, 2006) p. 259. 3 Judith Halberstam, ‘Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography,’ A/B: Auto/biography Studies 15: 1 (2000) p. 64. 4 Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) 14. -is also a recurring concern in Angela Carter’s early writing. To take just one significant example, in her 1975 essay on fashion and femininity,‚The Wound in the Face,‛ Carter uses the figure of the transvestite to satirically express her bemused alienation from the ‘female impersonation’which normative femininity requires of women, noting that ‘fashionable women now tend to look like women imitating men imitating women.’5 The emergence of queer theory in the 1990’s saw the questioning of concepts fundamental to Second Wave feminism, including the very concept of‘women’ as a political category, with Judith Butler asking: ‘To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix? [emphasis added] .’6 The Passion of New Eve was published long before the advent of queer theory and Carter’s work is more commonly situated within Second Wave feminist contexts and yet, as Joanne Trevenna has observed, queer frameworks are increasingly being mobilised to enable reassessments Carter’s work. Trevenna more specifically notes the ‘Butlerification’ of Carter’s fiction which, she suggests, has ‘facilitated a kind of feminist ‘recovery’ of Carter’s work since the novelist’s death in 1992.’7 Indeed, the prominence of gender crossing as a motif in The Passion of New Eve seems to lend itself readily to explorations of performativity. Catrin Gersdorf, in ‘The Gender of Nature’s Nation: A Queer Perspective,’pronounces Eve ‘perfectly queer in that s/he embodies the disparity between physiological sex and psychological gender.’8 Moreover, in ‘Unexpected geometries: transgressive symbolism and the transsexual subject in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve,’ Heather L. Johnson gives voice to the reconstruction of Carter’s texts as 5 Angela Carter,‚The Wound in the Face,‛ Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and

FAQs

How does queer theory often figure the transgendered subject in relation to queer tropes?

The transgendered figure is frequently treated as a key queer trope that functions as an entry point for queer theory within academia. This can lead to readings that treat transgender themes as embodied shorthand for queer intent.

What tension does the article identify between feminist politics and transgendered identity in The Passion of New Eve?

It focuses on conflicts between Second Wave feminist critiques of femininity and the later queer-theoretical mobilization of gender crossing and performativity. The discussion shows how Carter’s novel is reinterpreted through these competing frameworks.

What does Jay Prosser’s approach contribute to the debate over performativity and transgender representation?

Prosser emphasizes the materiality of the sexed body and questions figurative uses of trans figures as mere signifiers of gender transgression. He also highlights how bodily integrity is both contested by theory and sincerely aspired to in transsexual narratives.

Jul 3, 2026

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