Masculinity, mortaliity and sexual politics
Gatsby (1925): ‘Could be a stage actress of another era is one guess. A feminist poet. A mistress of Ernest Hemingway. A once-famous traveller in Arabia. An heiress to the Nivea fortune. The illegitimate daughter of Pablo Picasso’ ( Jacobson 2019a : 235). 19 She is also a self-conscious performer who only ‘believe[s] things while [she’s] saying them’ and who rejects ‘the literalism of our times’, preferring ‘the past’s great masquerade of insincerity’ to what she calls the current ‘age of authenticity’ (78, 255, 256). Shimi is also a performer and something of an