‘Technology errs’: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, queer stereo, and failure

Maric-Cleaver, Adam (2025) ‘Technology errs’: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, queer stereo, and failure. English, 73 (283). pp. 201-217. ISSN 0013-8215

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Abstract

Brigid Brophy’s 1969 novel In Transit has been consistently read as a novel which troubles gender, centring on a character, Pat O’Rooley, who forgets his/her gender in an airport transit lounge. Yet, whilst most critiques focus on the relationship between gender/sex and language in Brophy’s metafictional novel, I suggest that Brophy also turns to a more technological, non-literary medium in order to represent Pat’s gender deviance: that of stereophonic sound and broadcasting. Using a combination of queer theory and sound studies, as well as archival components, I show the ways in which stereo aesthetics play out in Brophy’s presentation of non-binary gender. Read this way, In Transit becomes a novel about the failure of the novel to represent stereo sound and, through this, the failure of language to represent non-standard gender identities. This failure, I argue, itself constitutes a form of gender expression, which I here formulate as ‘Queer Stereo’.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2025.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	literature and literary theory ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1208
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Aug 2025 15:30
Last Modified:	22 Aug 2025 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100221
DOI:	10.1093/english/efaf004

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