“I Am in Control”: Strategic Gender Performance and Agency in Joyce Carol Oates’s Marya: A Life

This article examines gender performativity as a strategic mode of agency in Joyce Carol Oates’s Marya: A Life (1986), focusing on the production of female scholarly identity within patriarchal academic institutions. Existing criticism has largely interpreted Marya’s development through psychological trauma, maternal reconciliation, or inner healing, tending to locate agency in psychic resolution rather than in the negotiation of institutional power. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this study argues that Marya’s agency emerges through calculated gender performances rather than through the attainment of a coherent or authentic identity. Through close textual analysis, the article traces three interconnected stages in Marya’s trajectory. It first examines her adoption of masculinized behaviors as strategies for academic legitimacy, revealing the limits of masculinity when performed by a female body. It then analyzes her tactical switching between masculine assertion and feminine vulnerability in interpersonal and institutional encounters, showing how gender functions as a situational resource. Finally, it conceptualizes Marya’s later position as a feminist intellectual as a form of “meta-performance,” in which scholarly authority and feminist critique coexist within the same institutional framework. By foregrounding the performative construction of scholarly authority, this study reframes Marya: A Life as a critical exploration of how gendered agency is negotiated and rendered intelligible within patriarchal academic culture.

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