She does not show to be troubled with her gender as a girl but she still shows a notion of vulnerability or maybe an understandable lack of self confidence as a teenager in the way she perceives her femininity. She describes herself to be:Ī slender, white-faced, unremarkable-looking girl, with the sleeves of her dress rolled up to her elbows, and a lock of lank and colourless hair forever falling into her eye, and her lips continually moving to the words of some street-singer’s of music-hall song.

She presents herself to be like any other normal girl she lives with a family who run an oyster parlour, she has a dear sister and a beau “a boy named Freddy” (p.5). Nancy, the protagonist and the narrator of the book, starts her story by showing us her childhood life in Whistable (a small town in Kent that is famous for its delicious oysters). In the first part she introduces Nancy to the world of male impersonators through the character of Kitty the performer, in the second part she examines the power of class in shaping gender expressions through the character of the rich woman Diana, and in the last part she places a matured Nancy into a world of philanthropy and social activism through the character of Florence.

She examines Nancy’s gender transformation against the powerful drive of desire, performativity, language, melancholia and class. Each part unfolds in a set of different events that helps shape Nancy’s fluctuated gender. Walters divides the book into three major parts of Nancy’s life. It crosses the boundaries of the strictly heteronormative society of a Victorian England during the 1890s and shows the fluidity of gender in the context of different regulatory frames of desire, culture and class. Sarah Walter’s lesbian romance novel ‘Tipping the Velvet’ takes us into an exhilarating journey of Nancy’s playful sexuality.

Exciting news: Ebra wa Kushtuban is the first audio book launched by Safahat Sowt.

Tipping the Velvet: The axis of powers shaping Nancy’s gender identity.

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Tipping the velvet novel