Re-representing Representations in Janice Galloway's Foreign Parts

This essay seeks to examine Janice Galloway's second novel Foreign Parts (1994) as a subversive text whose apparent light-heartedness conceals a powerful challenge to historical and cultural modes of portraying femininity. The author aims in particular at contesting the representation of the female body as an object of desire generated by the male gaze. While the absence of an immediate Scottish setting in the text proposes to foreground female concerns in their own rights, Galloway also employs a stock device of Scottish literature — the doubling pattern — to depict the unique but largely neglected subject of female bonding.