Why teaching and clowning are near cousins...

Right now I'm teaching a class on Gender, Literature, and Sexuality. But like many classes, I don't feel like the students are stepping back to see the connections between the reading material and the larger themes of the course. So I've decided to "come out" and ask them. Of course, being always ready to share my thoughts, I had to come up with an answer of my own. Here's the somewhat peculiar lesson that came of this query. I'm basically saying that some of the literature we've read helps us to think of gender as a believeable fiction instead of just a fact we take for granted.


So if Audre Lorde can sucessfully use literature to redefine gender, does that mean that gender, like literature, is a fiction? Is it something real or something that we only imagine to be real? One way we talk about the reality of fiction is as its believability. After reading a book, one might criticize it by saying 'that wasn't believable', meaning that it didn't create a 'temporary suspension of disbelief'?

As a sidenote, I love this phrase 'temporary suspension of disbelief' because it implies that for the good part of the day, we're skeptical but occasionally we let something slide and choose to believe it - like food, right? - we have to take a break from disbelief for lunch, otherwise we'd starve... if there is such a thing.

But back to my point. What if gender, like literature, also has do with believability? What if gender is a fiction that only lasts as long as others believe in it. If this is the case, if gender is partially a product of the imagination, then with a powerful enough imagination it might be possible to re-write one's gender as long as the re-writing is believable. Note that this also suggests that, like literature, gender depends on an audience.

Here's an example involving yours truly. On the one hand, if I were to tell you that I'm the reincarnation of Beowulf. A kind of warrior-man. And that I'm searching for a King to which to pledge my allegiance with the hopes that he will give me a chest full of treasure for every red dragon that I slay, you probably won't believe me - since that definition of masculinity is no longer acceptable (which probably happened around the time that dragons became extinct). So if I were to tell you this today, you probably wouldn't believe me. In fact, you would probably avoid me.

On the other hand, I could say, like other men, I'm brave, but not pick up a weapon and get myself killed brave, I'm just brave enough to cry, admit when I'm wrong, or even that, yes, because I spent a lot of time with my mother growing up I developed a fussy taste in clothes. And this might believable because these admissions are a form of bravery - they are manly in the sense that they possess a sliver of heroism. In fact, this is one subtle adjustment to masculinity that occurs in Barker's Regeneration. It's feasible that one could slightly modify a convention of masculinity this way, with nothing but the use of the imagination. And why, because it's believable.

Of course, a more common example of this is a male who passes as a female or a female who passes as a male, a transexual. Here's an instance where the 'technical' sexuality doesn't match up with the perceived gender of the individual. And, by passing in public, by persuading an audience, his or her sexuality becomes just as much a fact as anyone else's.