CROSSING, TRUTH AND BODY: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN GIRL MEETS BOY BY ALI SMITH IN THE LIGHT OF JUDITH BUTLER

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of Ali Smith's novel Girl Meets Boy (2007), anchored in Judith Butler's performative gender theory and in dialogue with Foucault and Sedgwick, which addresses the relationship between truth, identity and language. Based on the deconstruction of sexual binarism and the critique of the normativity imposed by naming regimes, we analyze how Smith's narrative becomes a crossing — a gap through which the essence can breathe. By articulating body, silence and memory, the text proposes an ethical reconfiguration of the subject, guided not by normative coherence, but by the freedom to be.