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Abstract
In her short story ‘Boys and Girls’, Alice Munro depicts an unnamed girl and her growing process before and after gender differentiation becomes part of her lived experience. As a girl in the mid-20th century in a remote rural area where patriarchally constructed gender roles are accepted as the natural order of things, she has no way but to learn about the predetermined gender identities according to the norms fit for female and male subjects. Despite desiring to be free from the sanctions of her patriarchal society and to be a part of ungendered spaces, the young narrator is torn between two different gender roles assigned by her parents: being a ‘little girl’ to her mother in the kitchen and a ‘little man’ to her father in the fox farm. However, she ends in a binary of non-choices in which she is forced to meet the patriarchal expectations of gendered dichotomies and to be a gendered subject. Hence, considering the issues regarding gender differentiation and construction and grounding the argument in Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, in this study, I have aimed to display how gendered norms and stereotypes attached to each gender, but especially to women, shape their identity formation and imprison them into gendered spaces.
