Gender Representation, Media Discourse and Sexual Performativity

A Reading of Philip Roth’s The Breast

Abstract

Mass media do not merely reflect social reality. They actively construct and normalize particular models of femininity and masculinity. Women are frequently represented through restrictive images of beauty, domesticity, and passivity, reinforcing patriarchal power structures. This study examines gender representation, media discourse, and sexual performativity through a literary critical analysis of Philip Roth’s The Breast. Departing from predominantly psychoanalytic and absurdist interpretations, the study argues that the novella exposes and literalizes the objectifying logic embedded within patriarchal media culture. Drawing on Butler’s concept of gender performativity, Foucault’s theory of productive power, McIntosh’s critique of sexual categorization, and Bertens’s poststructuralist perspective on unstable meaning, the analysis explores how gender and sexuality are discursively produced rather than biologically determined. Through the protagonist’s transformation into a breast, Roth destabilizes binaries such as male/female, active/passive, and heterosexual/homosexual. Ultimately, text reveals fragility of patriarchal norms and reconceptualizes gender as fluid, contingent, and socially constructed.