The Third Gender Conundrum: A Critical Reading of Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

Gender is a social construct that has acquired the status of a natural phenomenon over the years, owing to the history and tradition behind its social, linguistic and cultural performance. The social conditioning on the binary system of gender necessitated the creation of a third category to represent deviant expressions. This paper critically examines the limitations of a third gender category as an expression of identity. It argues that while the third gender as a category provides social acceptance to a certain level, it is still reductive and is an offshoot of the very binary system of gender classification it challenges. The study seeks to examine this problem through a critical reading of the 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. The characters from the novel are analyzed to explore the shifts in cultural and social discourses around the traditional binary gender system. It examines how the characters navigate the intersections of sex and gender through self-expression, thereby contributing to the need to revisit the third gender as a linguistic, social and cultural expression of gender deviance. The paper calls for a revisionist approach to initiate a paradigm shift in the mainstream perceptions of gender identity.