Genre Trouble: Metadramatic Fiction and Female Being in Montserrat Roig's "L'òpera quotidiana"

Hornby identifies five types of conscious or overt metadrama: 1) the play within the play, 2) the ceremony within the play, 3) role-playing within the role, 4) literary and real-life reference, and 5) self-reference (32).2 Of the five types of conscious or overt metadrama defined by Hornby, two produce the most dynamic effects in L'òpera quotidiana: literary and real-life reference and role-playing within the role. Appropriating the difference politics of Kristeva's second generation of feminist history and the gynocriticism of third-wave feminist literary critics, Judith Butler challenges the distinction between sex as biological and gender as cultural and deconstructs the categories of sex and gender in her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Troubled by écriture féminine's, potential universalization of woman (not allowing for such concerns as race and class), third-wave feminist literary theorists, like Butler, turn away from the body as essence and begin to view the body as a gender-performative space. Through the metadramatic effects of self-reference, literary and real-life reference, and role-playing within the role, L'òpera quotidiana operates on postFranco Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, the legacy of catalanisme, the problem of the xarnego community, the shifting roles of men and women.