Tipping the Velvet

In Tipping the Velvet, gender and performance connect through individual agency. Nan, Kitty, and Diana demonstrate how gender can be performed, linked to the costumes, actions, and appearance that they adopt. Tipping the Velvet is in conversation with a long line of LGBTQ+ scholars who have written about the connections between the perceptions of gender and the act of performance. Judith Butler is the most notable scholar in this field and wrote the seminal queer theory text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, eight years before Tipping the Velvet was written. Butler’s scholarship was cutting-edge when Waters wrote Velvet, placing the novel in direct conversation with their work. Butler traces the performative nature of gender through the repetition of language and actions that prescribe gender: The ideas we have about the genders of “man” and “woman” are constructed through daily repetitions of action and language that validate these views. Gender, for Butler and queer theorists, is not a given but rather a socially constructed epiphenomenon.

In Waters’s novel, Nan’s performance of masculinity leads her to a complex relationship with self-identifying as a masculine person/man, which Nan expresses through vivid

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