Queer feminist hermeneutics: Deconstructing patriarchal logic in Ali Smith’s Girl meets boy

This article analyses Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007) as a radical ‘queering’ of the Western literary tradition, critically engaging with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and, more specifically, to reinterpret the classical myth of Iphis and Ianthe. Smith exposes the persistent phallocentric reasoning that defines non-heteronormative desire as amor impossibilis (impossible love), thereby confronting some foundational roots of contemporary gender politics. The analysis proposed here aims to discuss how Smith transposes the Ovidian conflict from biological impossibility to cultural prejudice, radically reclaiming metamorphosis as a principle of queer fluidity rather than an instrument of heteronormative restoration. The article employs a theoretical framework integrating queer and performative theory (Butler 1993, 2004; Sedgwick 1990, 1994) and reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004) to undertake a close reading of the novel’s formal and stylistic innovations constituted by Smith’s manipulation of grammar and syntax as a direct political intervention. The analysis examines the metamorphic prose and pronominal flux of the love scenes, which perform an anti-essentialist fluidity, against the constrained language of internalised patriarchal homophobia, notably the use of parentheses as a textual ‘closet’. The subsequent integration of feminist literary criticism (Lanser 1992, 2014; Flint 1993, 2000) with Hans Robert Jauss’s reception theory will conclusively be employed to argue that the novel is meticulously structured to dismantle the readership’s horizon of expectations, cultivating a gendered ethics of reception which compels readers into a critical dialogue with their ingrained assumptions about gender and sexuality. The result is a kind of queer feminist hermeneutic understood as a mode of reading canonical texts that constitutes an act of ethical and political engagement.