pont-lurching-2017.pdf (282.37 kB)
Lurching
Lurching
History
Issue
34Pagination
98 - 120Publisher
Monash UniversityLocation
Melbourne, Vic.Publisher DOI
Link to full text
ISSN
1325-9490Language
engResearch statement
As theorised by Connell (2005), one can conceptualise masculinity via the notion of practices of hegemonic (and other forms of) masculinity, the former being behaviours that serve to effectively dominate women. Fictional creative works can be sites where these concepts are tested via the labour of characterisation, as well as unsettled and challenged by unexpected narrative turns. Unreliability in narrative voice has been theorised straightforwardly by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and the second source of unreliability in the narrative voice or point of view is due to a character’s ‘personal involvement’ (1983:103). The latter can skew the character’s take on what they are seeing, hearing, being told and participating in. This long short fiction enacts the usage of a dual and spliced point of view strategy to tell its narrative, relying on each character’s vantage point being factually limited, thus rendering them unreliable. The POV switches between the two male protagonists. Unreliability is performed as the driving anxiety of the piece where each character doesn’t know the full story of that in which they are participating. The work queries two variations on non-hegemonic masculinity, with one character almost a caricature of not fitting this genre of gender practice/performance, while the other appears to conform, but the reader learns otherwise. The story also displaces conventional notions of primary relationship, shifting and complicating them, to explore the world of two men, who meet kindly. This long short-fiction was double-blind peer-reviewed as part of the journal’s publication policy. An unusually long work of journal fiction, its acceptance testifies to its contribution (see above). The journal is a long-standing literary and creative journal coming out of Monash University. The work effects a co-opting of the reader in a process of assumption that is overturned, attempting to challenge their own notions of gender and sexual norms.Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO MinorCopyright notice
2017, Antonia PontUsage metrics
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