Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender

Thomas Pynchon’s fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon’s representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre.Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon’s writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction’s whole worldview. The essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon’s novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon’s work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.

Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender . . . establish[es] that sex and gender are both crucial elements of his literary undertaking and inseparable from its ethical and political repercussions. . . . The overall scope of the collection is impressive, encompassing Pynchon's oeuvre in its entirety while detailing the significance of the ways in which he handles such topics as child abuse, family values, motherhood, and sex work.--Bill Solomon "American Literary Scholarship ", Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender delivers on the promise to examine this gaping hole in Pynchon studies [and] offers an exhaustive answer to the representation of sex and gender in Pynchon's fiction... The wide-ranging foray into academic discourses and cultural contexts never loses sight of the text... creating new inroads into Pynchon's work.--Bastien Meresse "Orbit: A Journal of American Literature "

Ali Chetwynd is a senior lecturer at the American University of Iraq. His work has appeared in College Literature, English Studies, and Twentieth Century Literature. Joanna Freer is a lecturer in twentieth-century literature at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge UP, 2014), and is currently an editor of the journal Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. Georgios Maragos is an independent scholar from Athens, Greece. His work has appeared in Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, as well as two collections: Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives (Rodopi, 2010) and Thomas Pynchon: The (de)vices of Global (post)modernity (Learned Society of the Catholic University of Lublin, 2000).