Performance and Performativity: Undoing Fictions of Women Business Owners

This article explores the representation of women small business owners in three contemporary novels; Chocolat , The Shipping News and Back When We Were Grownups . The primary contribution is to demonstrate how fiction can both challenge and collude in dominant constructions of entrepreneurship, which is more generally gendered as male and masculine. Judith Butler's thinking on performativity with regard to gender and sexual desire is applied to...