Constraint and corporeality: reading Brooke-Rose and Garréta’s gendered experiments

This essay considers – and seeks to complicate – the critical tendency to gender constrained writing as 'masculine' and to read women's experimental literature as a 'feminine' writing of the body. Via readings of Christine Brooke-Rose's Between and Anne Garréta's Sphinx (1986), it elucidates how the constraint in each novel actually produces the focus on the body – without thereby simulating a writing of the body – and on questions of gender and desire. In both novels, I suggest, gender itself emerges as a form of 'constraint'. In so doing, the essay seeks to move beyond any facile polarisation of constraint and excess, the conceptual and the embodied, and to unpick the gender-political possibilities of certain experimental literary strategies.