Nan King’s Orientation in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet: A Journey of Gender and Sexual Self-Discovery Following “The Slantwise Direction of Queer Desire”

In Tipping the Velvet (1998), Sarah Waters explores the notion of “gender performativity” as studied by Judith Butler (1990, 1993). Its protagonist, Nancy Astley, becomes aware of her sexuality and comes up with doubts about her gender as responding to the stable label society has put on her. This naïve girl moves from performing gender on stage to cross-dressing off-stage amid the crowds of London, not following, as Sarah Ahmed (2006) puts it, “the straight line” (p. 70). The aim of this paper is to explain how this straightness – both in terms of direction and heterosexuality – is the term Nancy, later on renamed Nan King, does not feel comfortable with. Throughout the novel, Nan’s discovery of a whole world of sexual and identity possibilities leads her to look for her own orientation, as her position in relation to the rest of “objects” around her is a queer one.