These thirteen original essays from the annual Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1994 at the University of
Mississippi, examine William Faulkner's texts in terms of their
surprising range of gender portrayals.
The collection explores such themes as the male homosocial urge
at the heart of warfare, the blurring of gender distinctions in
Faulkner's "epicene" figures, the function of cross-dressing as a
form of defiance of traditional hierarchies. Several of the essays
see in Faulkner a challenge to the "culture" vs. "nature" dichotomy
itself, suggesting that sex may be a product of gender rather than
its origin, that the line between the biological given and the
social performance may be even more tenuous than we have
assumed.
More than any other of the various contextualist approaches
brought to bear on Faulkner's work, the focus on gender exemplifies
the theory of the cultural construction of reality. Recent literary
criticism, in large part owing to the emergence of feminism, has
convincingly argued the difference between gender and sex, between
the acculturated and the natural. Among the results of the
attention to gender in Faulkner studies is a fresh sense of
fictional character as a site of multiple, sometimes clashing,
personae, each gender role a signifier threatening to float free,
speaking the reigning discourse, but always with a touch of
conscious or unconscious parody.
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