Memory and the Performance of Gender
Moderator:
Toby Rose
Northern
trose@nmu.edu
Divided Image/Undivided Memory: Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There and the Mainstreaming of
Transgender Memory
Recent
critical interest in autobiography and memoir often turns its attention to
narratives that push at what Leigh Gilmore calls “the limits of autobiography,”
the edges of what it means to tell the story of a life; another and often
connected academic interest in autobiography has been “busy consuming trauma,”
in Patricia Yeager’s formulation. In this essay, I turn attention toward an
autobiographical subject that, by its marginality, would seem to sit at the
limits of autobiography, but notably and carefully writes itself to the center.
Jennifer
Finney Boylan’s bestselling 2003 transgender memoir, She’s Not There: A
Life in Two Genders, is a best-selling text in the current memoir boom, and
Boylan has served in the public sphere as a
“representative” transgender person, her book on bestseller lists, a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Boylan herself
doing book tours and appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Her memoir is
received, then, within the context of the cultural work it does: in part, at
least, to “mainstream” transgender experience for a wide-ranging, implicitly
straight, bourgeois, and non-trans audience. Noting that her text invites
praise for what Anna Quindlen calls its
“universality” is nothing new, but such a response overlooks the complex ways
in which Boylan’s memoir creates that particular form
of a supposedly universal self.
Not
seeking to dismiss Boylan’s book by any means, I
investigate the ways in which she relies on a certain version of memory to
thread her way through what Gilmore calls the “paradox” of autobiography: the
demand that a life be both “unique” and “representative” at the same time—a
unique experience, but representative both of transgender experience and
equally representative of a uniform notion of selfhood. Given that the
transgender experience is embattled in the public sphere (what historian Allan Megill calls a “problematized”
identity) Boylan uses a series of before and after
photographs, along with the narration of a single and essentially unaltered
selfhood, to suggest that her experience is both unique and completely
familiar, that the self who is
written about does not shift, despite the significant social, physical, and
emotional changes of the transgender experience that she narrates. In that
complex relation between self-perception, self-presentation, and narration, a
much more complex and challenging reading of Boylan’s
book emerges.
Bill Albertini
Bowling Green State Univ.
woalber@bgnet.bgsu.edu
“Running Changes”: Music,
Memory and Identity in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet (New York, Vintage: 1998) has been read as both a
transgender text and a text about diaspora. It tells
the story of a Black Scottish jazz musician, Joss Moody, who lived as a
heterosexual male with a wife and adopted son but is revealed upon his death to
have been anatomically female. The novel takes the competing voices of jazz
music as the inspiration for its formal structure. It interweaves the memories of his grieving
wife and confused and angry son with the investigations of a cynical
hack-biographer who wants to expose the ‘true’ history of Joss’s life.
At the center of the novel the deceased
is brought back to life through a representation of one of his musical
performances. In the course of his performance, Joss is able to access his past
as a young girl and also imagine a wider history of transnational
migration. Paradoxically, though, his
own sense of self seems to crystallize at the point at which he ‘loses his sex,
his race, his memory’ (131). It is this section of the novel that forms the
focal point of my analysis as I consider Joss’s simultaneous expression and
deconstruction or ‘unwrapping’ of his own identity through music as a
counterpoint to the rest of the narratives’ attempts to reconstruct his life
with varying degrees of sympathy and sensitivity through memory, biography and
legal/medical discourses.
This paper draws on previous critical
readings of Kay’s work that have, for the most part, focused separately on the
issues surrounding either race or gender in the text. My analysis investigates
the intersection of the two by examining what might be imagined in place of a
stable point of origin. Part way through her own transgender memoir, She’s Not There (
Kay’s novel explores the ways in which
music and memory, performance and narrative can offer different models of
selfhood and identity that are based on a simultaneous remembering and
forgetting of the past. I argue that narrative representations of memory and
music provide a space for the destabilizing of racial and gender identities,
but also ask what model of selfhood might be being imagined in their place as
Joss creates a performative space in which he‘ ends
up with no body, no past, nothing’ (135). The narrative representation of
Joss’s performance involves the reader in the subject’s complex negotiation of
his own identity as other characters in the novel attempt to come to terms with
his life and legacy in their own ways. The dissonance between these voices not
only reflects the musical form but also points to the tension between narrative
(written, spoken, or musical) as a mode of remembering and a mode of being.
Jenna Isherwood
Bowling Green State Univ.
jcisher@bgnet.bgsu.edu
History and Feminist
Storytelling in Shashi Deshpande’s A
Matter of Time
Shashi Deshpande’s
post-colonial novel A Matter of Time
(1999) is an extended and poignant meditation on people’s relationship to the
past. Characters are haunted by the past—conceived in the novel as primarily
familial and ancestral—even as they struggle to understand it. Several views of
the past are offered: Is it preordained? Is it the product of human will? Is it
what we want to see? Is drawing attention to our view of the past simply an
attempt to conceal that which may contradict our view? Is this not what
academic historians do: practice a “deliberate deceit” by “draw[ing] your attention to what they want you to see, tak[ing] it away from what they
want to conceal” (99)? Deshpande seems to suggest
that none of these views is adequate. As long as we are players inside a story,
we are denied a full view of it. Only the one who stands outside the story
knows it fully. “History exists in the final analysis for God,” the novel
quotes Camus (99). This entity, “God,” that stands
outside history, is elsewhere evoked as the painter who catches us inside his
picture, making us see what he wants us to see. Like Vermeer, like God, like
the storyteller, “[O]nly the creator is free, only
the creator can be free because he is outside of it all” (55). What applies to
the human situation generally gains specific meaning in the context of women’s
situation. In other words, what does it mean to be trapped inside a male master narrative? Hence, what
appears at stake in a feminist text such as Deshpande’s
is the potential for female
storytellers to usurp the divine function of storytelling in order to free themselves. In the novel, one of the main characters, Sumi, writes plays that subvert traditional Hindu accounts
of female sexuality, showing its awesome, unbridled, and dark powers. In so
doing, surely she is usurping the role of divine creator and setting herself
free, “outside of it all.” And surely, then, she is herself a player in the
story created by Deshpande’s narrator, who is setting
herself free by telling Sumi’s story. This paper
explores the relationship between history and storytelling, elaborating upon
the resistance post-colonial female storytellers offer to “official history”
when they attempt to place themselves outside of it.
Alpana Sharma
Wright State Univ.
alpana.sharma@wright.edu
On Mothers and Daughters: The Inter-Generational Dialogue of Women[‘s]
Voices as Site of Memory in Post-Holocaust Writing
This paper investigates the place of the
female subject position in German-language literary productions after 1945, and
explores the inter-generational dialogue between women, specifically between
mothers and daughters as a compelling site of both private and public memory in
post-Holocaust writing. A close reading and discussion of Christa Wolf’s text Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood) will illustrate
the surfacing of previously repressed memory in a mother-daughter dialogue as a
moment of private and political significance. I will argue that the female
subject position provides a powerful alternative space in the exploration of
questions of guilt, responsibility, trauma, the recuperation of memory and a
new German identity.
Sonja J. Schoene
schoene@uiuc.edu