Women’s Studies: “Passing Zones: Women and Alternate Identities”

Session Coordinator: Katherine Gantz
Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Valparaiso University
122 Meier Hall, Valparaiso IN 46383
Katie.Gantz@valpo.edu

Session A

Passing as Countesses and (Beauty) Queens: Beauty and Class in Film Adaptations of Shaw’s Pygmalion

My Fair Lady (MFL) , Pretty Woman (PW), and Miss Congeniality (MC) each reshape Shaw’s critique of Edwardian class structure into a romantic comedy. In Shaw’s play, Eliza Doolittle becomes capable of passing as upper-class after six months of Professor Higgins’ tutelage in pronunciation, diction, and manners, after which she leaves Higgins. In MFL, Eliza returns to Higgins’ house at the end of the play, suggesting that they may remain together. In PW, Vivien is able to pass as upper-class after only one week, and much of her transformation lies in re-clothing her and restyling her hair. In fact, her diction changes almost magically; she abruptly shifts from “yeah,” to “Please do so.” Her ability to pass makes her a suitable spouse for billionaire “prince” Edward. In MC, the transformation takes only three days, after which an FBI agent passes as a contestant in a beauty pageant, the transformation in her appearance leading implausibly to a change in her behavior. The film insists, moreover, that because she is beautiful, she is also a lady.

Susan Wolfe and Roberta Rude
University of South Dakota
swolfe@usd.edu and rrude@usd.edu

Performing Gender: Brecht and Woolf Revisited

My paper sets out to explore the often downplayed affinities between two authors who have become emblematic of two intellectual traditions seen as complementary in some crucial respects, such as gender issues: Feminism and Marxism. What I propose is a comparative study between Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan and Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando focusing on how they resist or assume the representation in dramatic or filmic terms of the performativity of gender roles. Reading these two ‘texts’ side by side in light of Judith Butler’s insights into the politics of performative gender acts should help me envisage a possible subversive dimension to the way gender roles are depicted in Brecht’s epic theatre. Conversely I will also single out some elements borrowed from the Brechtian stage aesthetic for the making of Orlando, and on this basis invite considerations on the benefits of employing Brecht’s ideas not so much in film in general or in filmic adaptations of Woolf’s novels in particular, but in theatrical or cinematic stagings of gender, as an effective strategy to denaturalize and re-signify bodily categories of true sex, discrete gender and specific sexuality.

Gabriela Stoicea
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Stoicea@uiuc.edu

The Color Purple as an economic model: Discovering a black, lesbian, feminist, natural capitalism

Though Alice Walker may not be speaking directly to a previously existing economic discourse, her novel The Color Purple provides an alternative form of capitalism by reconstructing this oppressive model from the vantage of three traditionally oppressed categories: women, homosexuals, and people of color. Celie may pass as a humble business owner, but her existence and success offer an economic model which embodies the potentiality of a black, feminist, lesbian, natural capitalism.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels calls for an abandonment of capitalism in exchange for communism, while more recently modern scholars such as Paul Hawkins have attempted redefine the capitalist system by advocating for a more sustainable, organic capitalism dubbed “natural capitalism.” Drawing heavily on Marx and contemporary economic discourses, Luce Irigaray, in This Sex Which is Not One, represents women as “divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natural’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body” (180). I will use these texts to access the intersection of the capitalism of Marx and Hawkins with the feminism of Irigaray and Walker.

Kelly Rawson
University of Colorado at Boulder
Kelly.Rawson@colorado.edu

"Buried Alive": Passing and Notions of Identity in Stone Butch Blues

Jess, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues’ main character, describes her experience of “passing” through society as male: “At first, everything was fun. The world stopped feeling like a gauntlet I had to run through. But very quickly I discovered that passing didn’t mean just slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside” (173). In this paper, I will consider the ways that Feinberg’s idea of “passing,” in one sense, serves to resist a Foucauldian kind of disciplinary power—passing by the gaze, under surveillance’s radar, bypassing the normalizing effects of examination. However, I will also take into account how Jess’ more dynamic attitude toward her identity’s constraints reveals an interest with (and possible critique of) the notion of, extending beyond Foucault, identity itself. To broaden this analysis I will consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as presenting a similar treatment of identity through a “creature” narrative. This lens offers a way to situate Feinberg’s work as an intricate argument: exploring “passing” interrogates conventional notions of identity and offers possibilities for social and individual change through performance.

Cara Ogburn
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
ceogburn@uwm.edu

Session B

Eighteenth-Century French Transvestites: Women Writing the Male Epistolary Voice

One of the few areas in which French women were admitted to be superior to men by the eighteenth century was letter writing. Therefore, some of the most famous female characters in eighteenth-century French epistolary novels are in fact men in drag, such as Laclos' Mme de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons.

Despite the fact that the epistolary novel lends itself particularly well to passing between the sexes, eighteenth-century French literature does not possess nearly as many successful examples of women transvestites in the epistolary genre. Illustrating my argument with excerpts from texts by the better-known women writers from that period (Riccoboni, Graffigny, Charrière), I will attempt to uncover the underlying motives for this disparity between male and female transvestism in epistolary literature.

I will argue that these women writers' relative lack of interest in creating male characters in drag is directly related to their feminist aims in writing epistolary novels and that it originates in, among other causes, the critical correlation between epistolary exchange and sexual exchange. When women writers do create male characters in drag, what is their function? Are they in fact created solely so that they may be controlled or silenced?

Marijn S. Kaplan
University of North Texas
mkaplan@unt.edu

Finding "the dwelling place of the other in me": Transdermal Excursions in Rhys, Larsen, Hall, and Stein

The term “passing” integrates a stage of transition and movement with a term of racial resonance. I am interested in how cross-cultural women writers of fiction during the modernist period explore using one’s own race (as perceived by others) as a space in which to travel or discover identity. I will examine the labeling of racial identity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) and in Nella Larsen’s fiction. I will conclude by examining texts in which the “Otherness” of lesbianism is rewritten as racial difference to enable an acceptable “passing”: Radclyffe Hall’s short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (1926) and Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” (1909). In the former, a woman’s primitive identity in dream gives her placement in a world where, as a lesbian, she had no placement before. In the latter, Stein, a white American writer, crosses over to appropriate black dialect and conversational rhythms. Stein revises an earlier text, rewriting formerly lesbian characters as black characters in “Melanctha,” suggesting another “passing” from one kind of Otherness to another. By examining these works, I will explore how a reconception of the self can give these women freedom and mobility while investigating where Modernism arises out of racial crossing.

Joyce Kelley
University of Iowa
joyce-kelley@uiowa.edu

"Her mourning is all make-believe": Performing Widowhood

Apart from her tears, which can be manufactured, there is nothing specific to the widow’s body that marks her as widowed. In the nineteenth century when women conformed to a cultural expectation of conspicuous mourning, clothing signaled bereaved status. But while dress and veil confirm to the world the widow qua widow, clothing serves as a marker of a potentially unstable cultural identity. A number of Victorian novels feature women who pass as widows and place widowhood in conjunction with dissemblance. For the single mother seeking entrance in respectable society, widow's “weeds” may cloak a secret past. Anne Brontë's ersatz widow takes refuge at Wildfell Hall from an alcoholic husband (1848), while Elizabeth Gaskell's heroine in Ruth (1853) hides the sexual secret of her son's illegitimacy under the guise of widowhood. In Wilkie Collins’ No Name (1862), widowhood becomes one of the many “skins to jump into” that the heroine adopts to achieve the restitution of her inheritance. In all three texts, fictions of widowhood facilitate female agency and enable each heroine to circumvent legal and social fictions that are, in turn, interrogated and revealed to be in themselves pernicious.

Dagni Bredesen
Eastern Illinois University
cfdab@eiu.edu

The Significance of the Mulatto for the Theme of Passing in Francis Harper's Iola Leroy

The figure of the mulatto has been a central one in the numerous ante and postbellum narratives produced by black and white authors. While some critics considered the figure of the mulatto symbolic of a racial fusion and, thus, betrayal of the black race, others saw it as a vehicle of exploration of the relationship between the races and, as such, a useful instrument in establishing a contact between the races.

Discussing Frances Harper's novel Iola Leroy, I suggest Harper's representation of the mulatto is an act of resistance to the idea of the mulatto as a degenerate species. In the context of nineteenth-century cultural and political values, Harper not only was innocent of surrendering to audience constraints and catering to the white readership, but actually contributed to subverting the nineteenth-century racial ideology and the "findings" of the racial pseudoscience. Making her protagonist a fair-skinned mulatto allowed Harper to raise the theme of "passing" which was the focus of writings by black authors at the turn of the century.

Harper's novel, rather than being accused of being reconciliatory, should be praised for its courageous representation of the black race and its goals that gave people hope.

Maria Mikolchak
St. Cloud State University
mmikolchak@stcloudstate.edu