NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

PROLIFERATING VOIDS

  • OSCAR DAVIS
GENDER’S PRESENCE IN GENDERLESS NARRATIVES — In an experimental attempt to avoid all gendered markers while writing my unpublished novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, traces of gender seemed to still appear and, in turn, complicate the presence/absence binary. Inspired by Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx and her exploration of how genderless characters expand understands of love and writing form, this paper reflects on the logocentric restrictions and aporetic opportunities that come from textually avoiding gender.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and Judith Butler’s theories of gender subversion, my paper explores the potential that writing and reading gender-absent narratives and characters can have in unearthing logocentric hegemonies, proliferating gender, and encouraging love for Others and otherness. 

Keywords Genderless narrative, gender-absent narrative, deconstruction of logocentrism, creative practice research

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.3

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Oscar Davis is an early career researcher and holds a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University. Currently teaching creative writing at the University of Melbourne, Oscar’s research explores artistic rhetoric, experimental fiction and the cross sections between creative writing, ethics, and gender expression.

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RECALIBRATION OF THE PĀLI JĀTAKAS THROUGH SPECTER AND SAMSARĀ
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This paper reflects on a methodology within a Creative Writing PhD that recalibrates selected Buddhist Pāli Jātakas through a parallel reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Buddhist texts on samsarā (rebirth). This cross-cultural dialogue provides a nuanced context for rearticulating the Jātakas. The project’s ‘middle-way methodology’ avoids privileging either Western or Buddhist frameworks and adapts Smith and Dean’s (2009) ‘iterative cyclic web’ through oscillations across creative writing, cross-cultural reading, and critical inquiry.
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