Genres never stay pure and construct reality rather than merely reflecting it

Evidence

It is a truism of poststructuralist criticism that genre, like any other category, is defined by that which it is not. In his essay on genre, Jacques Derrida famously describes how the “law” of genre—to observe limits—is opposed by the “counterlaw”: that those limits will always nonetheless be transgressed. Thus, although genre supposedly organizes meaning in such a way as to avoid “impurity, anomaly or monstrosity,” in practice other forms, voices, and registers are always invading and troubling any notion of purity in genre. … She also quotes John Frowe’s view that genres also have a regulatory function in relation to reality. They “are ‘fixes’ on the world that have formative power as representational frames.…‘[G]enres create effects of reality and truth that are central to the ways the world is understood.’ ” For Frowe, “genres are constellations of thematic, formal and historical dimensions, that organise knowledge about attitudes towards the discursive world they constitute and refer to.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 216

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the reader a portable definitional claim — genre as a meaning-making rather than categorizing force — to wield in the Hamid/Naqvi analysis.
• XREF: Connects to poststructuralist theory the reader likely holds elsewhere in their knowledge base, and to the concept of ‘monstrosity’ as genre-contamination.