The Destabilisation of Gender and National Boundaries in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair: A Long Nineteenth-Century Perspective

This chapter explores the nexus between nation and gender in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, one of the most iconic texts of modern Scottish literature. By questioning canonical readings of the trilogy, focused on a conventionally nationalist stance or on the ‘realistic’ components of Gibbon’s masterpiece, it attracts the attention on its subtle, radical re-drawing of gender and national boundaries, especially in relation to its two central characters, Chris and her son Ewan. The chapter identifies a subtle androgynous subtext in the trilogy — a (cross-)gender imagi-nation, interestingly reverberating the perspective of a number of nineteenth-century Scottish literary texts. While Gibbon’s trilogy may not be consistently radical, it nonetheless creates ‘a ‘dislocated’ discursive system, whose inherent tensions and ambivalences powerfully subvert contemporary notions of nation and gender identity.