Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction

Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction Also by Kerry Mallan CHILDREN AS STORYTELLERS IN THE PICTURE: Perspectives on P...

Author: Kerry Mallan

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Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction

Also by Kerry Mallan CHILDREN AS STORYTELLERS IN THE PICTURE: Perspectives on Picture Book Art and Artists LAUGH LINES: Exploring Humour in Children’s Literature PERFORMING BODIES: Narrative, Representation, and Children’s Storytelling SERIOUSLY PLAYFUL: Genre, Performance and Text (co-editor with Sharyn Pearce) YOUTH CULTURES: Texts, Images, and Identities (co-editor with Sharyn Pearce) NEW WORLD ORDERS IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Utopian Transformations (with Clare Bradford, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum)

Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction Kerry Mallan

© Kerry Mallan 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20251-1 ISBN-10: 0-230-20251-9

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mallan, Kerry. Gender dilemmas in children's ﬁction / Kerry Mallan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20251-1 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-230-20251-9 (alk. paper) 1. Children's stories, English—History and criticism. 2. Children's stories, American—History and criticism. 3. Children's stories, Commonwealth (English)—History and criticism. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. Sex differences in literature. 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Human body in literature. 8. Homosexuality in literature. 9. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PR830.C513M36 2009 820.9'353—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2009013657

In memory of my beloved family Tom Murphy, Margaret Murphy, and Danny Murphy

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Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Rethinking Gender

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1 Desire, Pleasure, and Romance: Post-Feminism and Other Seductions

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2 The Beauty Dilemma: Gendered Bodies and Aesthetic Judgement

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3 Gendered Cyber-Bodies: The Dilemma of Technological ‘Existenz’

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4 Queer Spaces in a Straight World: The Dilemma of Sexual Identity

125

5 No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender

156

Conclusion

195

Notes

200

References

204

Index

216

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Figures 2.1 From Willy’s Mum by Scott Tulloch, reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers

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2.2 From Miss Bimbo website, reproduced by permission of Blouzar

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2.3 From The Flim-Flam Fairies by Alan Katz, illustrated by Michael Slack, reproduced by permission of RP/Running Press Kids, a member of Perseus Books Group

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2.4 From The Flim-Flam Fairies by Alan Katz, illustrated by Michael Slack, reproduced by permission of RP/Running Press Kids, a member of Perseus Books Group

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4.1 From Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press

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4.2 From Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press

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5.1 From The Race of the Century by Barry Downard, reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

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5.2 From The Race of the Century by Barry Downard, reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

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5.3 From The Visitor by Sonja Bougaeva, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press

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Acknowledgements In the process of writing this book I have received much support and encouragement from many valued friends, colleagues, and family. I would like to mention some by name as they are probably unaware of how much I have appreciated their contributions, their friendly enquiries as to how the book was progressing, and their positive encouragement during what turned out to be a difficult period of time for myself and my family. For her encouragement and insightful comments that helped shape my manuscript, I want to thank Wendy Morgan. I also acknowledge Kimberley Reynolds for her useful feedback on my initial proposal. For generous and stimulating discussions about many of the theories and issues I cover in this book I want to thank the Critical Dialogues group, particularly, Cherie Allan, Amy Cross, Michael Dezuanni, Anna Free, Jo Lampert, Geraldine Massey, and Peter Mountney. To the participants who attended the CLISS summer school held at Roehampton University in 2007, and especially Christine Wilkie-Stibbs, I enjoyed and benefited from our lively discussions about gender and sexuality. I want to thank Delia Hart for providing valuable research assistance in the early stages of the project and for her ongoing interest and support. I want to acknowledge the support I received from Queensland University of Technology, particularly the Faculty of Education, for granting me valuable professional development leave to begin the research for this book. Gratitude is due also to my Head of School, Annette Patterson, who not only gave me the space to write, but followed the book’s progress with keen interest. To my friends and colleagues Clare Bradford, Rod McGillis, John Stephens, Raylee Elliott Burns, Lyn Linning, and Hilary Hughes, thank you for your constant encouragement and support over many years. To the Palgrave Macmillan team, your professionalism and helpfulness have been most appreciated. Finally, thanks to my family Mick, Kim and Chris, and the Murphy clan, for your interest, patience, encouragement, good humour, and the occasional classical Greek anecdotes.

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Dilemma: (n.) A state of things in which evils or obstacles present themselves on every side, and it is difficult to determine what course to pursue; a vexatious alternative or predicament; a difficult choice or position.

Introduction: Rethinking Gender

In 1977 Gene Kemp’s book The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler was published. The book was an immediate hit and it seems all readers at the time, including me, were surprised by what is often described as a ‘twist’ in the ending. Throughout the book, the eponymous Tyke embarks on numerous escapades with loyal sidekick and not-so-bright friend Danny Clover. Tyke is messy, reckless, smart, quick-thinking, agile, fearless, and always in trouble at school. It is little wonder then that when readers discover at the end of the book that Tyke is a girl they feel they have fallen subject to a narrative deceit. Kemp avoids, until the postscript, the use of gendered pronouns when referring to Tyke, and gives her main character a gender-neutral first name; it seems this simple evasive tactic is enough to make readers feel that Tyke must naturally be a boy. The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler serves as a useful marker for thinking about gender and, in particular, the theme of this book, the dilemmas that surround gender and sexuality. The dilemmas I explore in this book do not centre simply on cases of mistaken identity, although these do occur in some chapters. Rather, my interest lies in teasing out and understanding what I see as key dilemmas arising from the contradictions and tensions between traditional gendered subject positions and new gender relations, and the dilemmas that emerge with respect to sexual difference. To rephrase the 1960s Virginia Slims cigarette slogan, ‘we’ve come a long way, baby’, and at a wider societal level we could list the social and cultural gains that have been made in the past 25 years since Kemp’s book was published with respect to gender equality, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation, paid maternity (and in some places paternity) leave, gay marriages and adoption rights. However, as we all know, these gains are far from universal, and the gaps within social policy, the 1

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law, education, politics, and everyday social practices become chasms for many whose gender and sexuality remain outside the normative or privileged limits. When problematisations have their bases in the tensions and contradictions within a binary system of gender, sex, and sexuality, people are faced with dilemmas. Many of the dilemmas, and underlying contradictions, problematisations, and subjective anxieties remain located in the often polarising and popularising discourses that inform theoretical, institutional, and wider societal understandings about changing gender relations. Post-feminism is an example of a contradictory discourse that the media often use as the scapegoat for myth-conceptions about gender in an advanced consumer culture of individualism and excess. As the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s Women’s Movement and Second Wave Feminism, post-feminism is often appropriated as a celebratory discourse in a range of cultural resources for children and young adults to assert female independence and agency while exposing males and masculinity as weak, flawed, and directionless. The new battle-of-thesexes rhetoric of popular culture and other media-driven outlets now spins on the dialectic of lost boys and empowered girls. However, these extremes of gender ‘realities’ become part of the circulating ‘truths’ that have accompanied the social and cultural changes of the past three decades. In response to feminist gains and advocacy, the proponents of the ‘men’s movements’, that gained momentum during the 1990s, offered ‘solutions to the damage … suffered by men’ (Connell, 2002, p. xi). However, as Connell notes, there is a contradiction at work as social movements usually arise from discontent, but ‘men questionably remain the principal holders of economic and political power in the contemporary world’ (p. xi). Despite this continuing hierarchy of gender and privilege, the lives of men and boys are certainly not trouble-free as high levels of violence, injury, ill health, and imprisonment are the realities for many men in countries across the globe. The effects of these gender practices ‘may also produce toxic effects in the lives of others’ (Connell, p. xii), both males and females, who become the victims of rape, domestic violence, racism, and homophobic attacks. These examples of competing gender discourses highlight how any attempt to change gender relations is not a simple matter of amending legislation, though this is a necessary step in the process. The central dilemma as I see it with respect to competing gender discourses is how to avoid perpetuating further contradictions by contributing to preserving and reproducing traditional gender relations and hegemonies. Simply inverting hierarchical conventions and power relations does

Introduction: Rethinking Gender 3

not seem an equitable solution. How these dilemmas are resolved or transformed will depend on how individuals and groups are able to resignify or adapt conventions in new ways. Such resignifications and adaptations rely on innovative and creative approaches if change is to be effective. Change in discursive practices of speaking, writing, and behaving inevitably involves transgression, crossing boundaries, and re-imagining new situations where past prohibitions and preclusions are dissolved. This view of change necessitates intervention, and as such it cannot avoid a trouble-free passage as individuals will always resist as well as comply with changes that impact on their sense of self and their view of the world. This project of change begins with rethinking gender. In rethinking gender by attending to its dilemmas within a context of change, I am setting an ambitious agenda. I am not proposing a single-handed intervention that will change the world. Rather, I approach this project by examining how children’s literature is responding to new gender relations with narratives that either sustain or challenge existing gender orders and configurations. Children’s literature will not change the world but it does make significant and often undervalued contributions to how its child readers see the world and their place in it. Children’s literature has similar functions to literature written for adults in that it is the vehicle for carrying, as well as exposing, ideologies about the hierarchical arrangements of society (Culler, 1997, p. 39). Children’s literature is not a monolithic field that offers a singular ‘voice’, nor does it invite a singular scholarship of interpretation. Nevertheless, it comes with a tradition that is often difficult to shake off: one that expresses itself as a traditional homology between a unified subject and a harmonious social context (or if the social context is not harmonious, a resolution towards harmony is often achieved by closure). However, despite the prevalence of this utopian view of ways of being in the world, children’s literature has its fair share of rebels (both writers and critics) who refuse to conform to tradition. Similarly, its readers are diverse in their ways of being in the world. In rethinking gender in children’s texts, this book considers alternative homologies with respect to the complex and various relations between individuals and social context represented in children’s fiction. By exploring these complex relationships, my intention is to cast light on some of the dilemmas that invariably arise when individuals do not fit neatly into normative categories of existence. My purpose in this book is not to raise a bundle of dilemmas and drop them in the reader’s lap. Rather, my purpose is to come at the

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subject of gender from different angles, examining how the narrative practices of contemporary children’s literature – the dilemmas, antagonisms, resolutions, and disruptions that they express – can be understood by means of both a critical framework and a broader set of social discourses. As David Buchbinder notes, social or cultural discourse ‘determines what can be spoken about, and in what terms and with what sorts of values. It also determines who has the authority to speak about and to whom, and who can only be spoken to’ (1998, p. 11). I draw on a range of theoretical insights to assist in my subsequent examination of the primary texts I have selected. My intention is not to ‘apply’ theory but to put theoretical perspectives to work as I explore key dilemmas and other sub-dilemmas and problematics arising within the children’s texts and from the cultural discourses which inform them. Before outlining my critical framework, I want to make explicit the assumptions that implicitly inform this book.

Assumptions There is somewhat of a doubling of affect at work in writing and reading a book. For the writer there is the excitement and fear that one’s readers might similarly approach the text with mixed feelings. My concern is not that a response of ‘not another book on gender’ might result in the book not being read, but, more importantly, that the topic is foreclosed. Have we really reached a point of saying ‘been there, done that’ with respect to debates about feminism and gender in children’s narratives? There is also another matter that concerns many who write from within the field of children’s literature scholarship and that is that we are speaking to ‘family’. What does a book about gender issues and children’s literature possibly have to say to those scholars and students working in other areas of literary and cultural studies? The assumptions that give rise to these questions are worth considering. Citing children’s literature does authorise a certain kind of space within the broader domains of literary, educational, and cultural studies. However, the response to this relegation of space within the debate need not be one of resignation to keeping it in the family, neither should it necessarily mean a withdrawal from the debates in the wider theoretical and societal arenas. On the contrary, I take the issue of authorisation as my motivation: how can we read gender differently in children’s literature studies? What do we have to contribute to the debates and discussions that will provoke a more inclusive community of scholars? How can we demonstrate the value of texts written for


children and young people to those who are unfamiliar with them? I am certainly not the only scholar in children’s literature who has responded to these questions by producing texts that speak to the broader disciplines. I won’t name these writers at this point as my list would surely be incomplete, but their work will become evident in the following chapters. In aiming for an inclusive readership that entails not only students and scholars within the field of children’s literature but those outside it, I also have to consider my assumptions about readers of this book. As a valued colleague pointed out to me, ‘there is much to be gained from bringing the reader into the conversation’. In taking onboard this advice, I have endeavoured to temper my enthusiasm for abstract theorisation for a more accessible account whereby the often esoteric terminology of the discourses I draw upon are not treated as a self-evident treatise, but as ideas to be explicated clearly and contested if necessary. I doubt I have been entirely successful in achieving this. A significant assumption that is implicit in this book is the view that gender is discursively constructed within a heterosexual matrix of power. This view is informed principally, but not solely, by Judith Butler’s understanding of gender in her book Gender Trouble (1990). I do not endorse a view that one’s gender is an essential ‘given’, but following the work of Butler I see the value in considering gender as something that we ‘do’ rather than ‘are’. Butler’s notion of performativity is central to my discussion. As Butler explains, ‘gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed’, ‘a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint’ (2004, p. 1). Butler’s observation about gendered performance, improvisation, and constraint supports the conceptual framework of this book, which is outlined in the next section. Another position that is at the heart of this book is the problematic use of the pronoun ‘we’. At times I speak to a universal reader, but this is part of my writerly intention to bring the reader into the conversation. However, I do not insist upon nor do I accept a taken-for-granted ‘we’ with respect to shared interpretations and ideological positions and positionings. On the contrary, I argue that ‘we’ are constituted through acts of exclusion and othering, and any attempt to speak on behalf of everyone (or someone) is not only foolish but obscures or conceals the differential contexts (social, political, historical, cultural) ‘we’ inhabit. In reading literature we need to be mindful that representation risks promoting a specific mode of being as its ideal (Grosz, 1995, p. 32). Such idealisation can result in either erasing difference or converting difference to a variation of an ideal.

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In a similar way, I see literature and other cultural texts as highly ambivalent and open to multiple interpretations. However, to avoid a fragmented and never-ending proliferation of meanings, it is necessary to settle for a particular interpretation, which is informed and supported by close textual analysis and theoretically nuanced perspectives. This is not an easy task. Also, it is not so much a matter of getting it ‘right’ but of offering reasonable and supportable interpretations which ascribe certain meanings and significances. Texts produced for children and young adults are written, produced, circulated and consumed within social and cultural contexts which are already invested with sets of meanings about intended readership, form, and content (Hunt, 1991). Fairclough (1992, p. 80) too notes the social constraints that operate on the conventions for production and interpretation and the nature of social practices these conventions are a part of. These constraints, conventions, and social practices with respect to children’s literature should not be seen as a reason to ‘water down’ either children’s literature or children’s literature scholarship into a digestible pap that will not cause any discomfort. Children and critics both need hearty literary delights to ensure they come back for more. Finally, in rethinking gender, I am primarily concerned with bodies, and to borrow from Butler (1993) ‘bodies matter’. I am mindful of how the assumptions discussed above (and others that remain implicit) influence understandings of gendered bodies and our various responses to the dilemmas that arise in relation to prevailing, binarised categories in Western thought that privilege one term over the other (mind over body; reason over emotion; self over other; male over female; ‘white’ over ‘non-white’; human over machine). Theory and fiction often go hand-in-hand, so to speak, in their approaches to bodies: bodies are both the subject and object of their interests, located in both fantasy and reality, discussed as superficial and psychic entities, depicted as active and passive, powerful and powerless, as human and cyborg. All these manifestations of the body as lived, experienced, fantasised, and theorised open up for us the means to rethink the assumptions that guide our knowledge of existence and to defamiliarise our lives by writing/reading about them in a different way which may provoke critical reflection.1 The following section provides a detailed mapping of my approach and argument as I trace out the conceptual and methodological framework that will assist me in my analysis of texts in relation to gender and sexuality. By focusing on the dilemmas that pervade gender and sexuality in texts produced for children and young people, I hope to raise


questions and offer informed readings about the fictional subjects, how they come into existence, how they are constructed through the texts, and the limits and possibilities of those constructions.

The view from the inside In surveying the view from the inside, I am referring to fictional texts produced for and presumably read by children and interested adults. The view reveals that children’s literature has been concerned conventionally and historically with young people’s identity formation and the dilemmas or obstacles characters encounter along the way. Culler captures succinctly one dimension of the dilemma of identity that informs approaches to literary constructions: ‘Is the self something given or something made, and should it be conceived in individual or in social terms?’ (2007, p. 34). Culler poses his questions as if the binaries he nominates – given/made; individual/social – must be in opposition, a view that as I mentioned above is reflective of Western thinking’s preference for establishing binary categories and hierarchies. Of course, the reality is that identity entails both oppositional and corresponding sets of conditions. These varied conditions that shape identity formation are also found in literary representations whereby ‘struggles about identity are struggles within the individual and between the individual and group: characters struggle against or comply with social norms and expectations’ (Culler, 2007, p. 35). Narrative closure in young adult (YA) novels, in particular, typically provides a point where the individual has arrived; a moment of self-realisation or self-actualisation, whereby the struggles of finding one’s ‘true’ identity have been overcome. In this typical coming-of-age narrative, there is often an underlying premise of an essential self that will emerge or be discovered. This trajectory turns the narrative into a self-fulfilling, albeit paradoxical, quest – seek and ye shall find what was there to begin with. Such a narrative resolution provides readers with a reassurance that things will work out for the best in the end, which is an enduring feature of the genre and part of liberal-humanism’s project of harmonious individuality. Individuality is a concept which presupposes that there is something possessed within each of us which marks our unique ‘essence’. This essentialist view of ‘the individual’ assumes that identities are self-evident and unchangeable. However, as I mentioned previously, this is not a view to which I subscribe. Rather, my interest lies in how identities and subjectivities are constructed within language and discourse. By joining two concepts – identities and subjectivities – it may seem that I see the

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two as synonymous. This is not the case, but I do see the two as constitutive of postmodernist and post-structuralist debates which question their critical relationship. For postmodernists and post-structuralists, the subject is not a coherent being or individual who has an essential core of identity. Rather, ‘the subject’ is a process of becoming (Butler, 1990a), and subjectivities, or how we come to experience our ‘selves’, is always multiple and discursively constructed. In children’s literature this often evolves as a tortuous journey of becoming – becoming more mature, more sensitive, more empathetic, more other-regarding, more ‘grown-up’. For girls and boys (both fictional and real), gender serves as the organising pedagogical tool for their becoming women and men (see Nelson & Martin, 2004; Pearce, 2002). In the process of becoming, children are not only instructed in certain sanctioned ways of being, but cautioned about inappropriate behaviours (for example: big boys don’t cry; girls should not behave like tomboys). Children’s literature is part of this pedagogical process but its lessons are not always sung to the same tune. The reason for this lack of harmony is that children’s literature, like other texts, is informed by discourses which carry particular views of the world (ideologies) and assumptions. Gender is inevitably part of the discursive frameworks operating often implicitly in texts. Given these different discourses, assumptions, and ideologies from which texts are written, children’s literature encourages its ideal readers to take up certain subject positions. In other words, fiction not only represents a world of subjects who know, understand, and act in particular ways, but also offers the reader a subject position: ‘the position from which the text is most readily intelligible’ (Belsey, 2002, p. 62). However, as Stephens (1992, p. 50) notes with respect to children’s literature, the subject positions available to child readers are often ‘restrictive and restricted’; just how this is so remains open to debate. In terms of gender and sexuality, there is a tendency for texts to offer subject positions that express the assumptions and ideologies of dominant cultural groups. Thus, narrative is one of the ways of reproducing subjectivity in that its persuasive language may influence the ways readers ‘understand themselves and their relation to the real relations in which they live’ (Belsey, 2002, p. 61). However, as we know, readers come to texts as subjects who are already socially and historically positioned and these subject positionings will play a large part in shaping how readers interpret fiction (Eagleton, 1983, p. 83). Also, readers are not always compliant and many texts do not simply offer a single or ‘restricted’ subject position throughout the course of the narrative.


We need to ask questions of these subject positions with respect to gender and sexuality, particularly their impact on notions of identity and subjectivity. Some of these are: What happens when new-founded identities incite conflict from others? When our quest for constructing a coherent identity for oneself is at the expense of another person’s freedom? When we have to perform an identity from a restricted set of ways of being? When our performance results in a rejection of that identity by others? As Culler indicated above, these questions shift attention from the individual to broader social and philosophical concerns, by asking implicitly how subjectivity is understood in relation to the other. They also point to the problematic nature of identity as a coherent entity or project of individuality. The dilemmas that stab at the heart of these questions will be explored in more depth in the following chapters. The dilemmas that ‘identity’ presents are also the subject of feminist, queer, and post-structuralist theories: theories which carry different ideological positions and often entail their own internal crises. One crisis that is central to postmodernity is ‘the death of the subject’, which suggests a foreclosure on discussions of gender. Alternatively, ‘the crisis’ might offer ways to understand the process of the subject’s (gendered) construction. The work of theory, as I see it, is both to illuminate and to re-imagine existing conditions. Both purposes help to disrupt certain givens and assumptions by providing us with conceptual tools for envisaging a different social order and for teasing out the uneven conditions under which we live our lives and experience our subjectivities. Of course, all theories and discourses carry their own assumptions, a fact that can be forgotten in our enthusiastic, even evangelistic, take up of their arguments and perspectives. It is literature’s function to take readers into its stories and to offer spaces for pleasure, self-reflection, identification, and imagining of the worlds it creates and the characters which inhabit those worlds. Children’s literature provides protagonists whom young readers can identify with to some degree (albeit by age or circumstance). The first-person narrator, a common device used by writers to achieve identification between text and reader, is a form of agency whereby the narrator’s ‘I’ enunciates an active and determining presence (Ahmed, 1998, p. 151). Theoretical writings tend to take a broader view by focusing on social identities that are shaped by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, and so forth. Thus, both theory and literature are interested in identity, and for scholars interested in children’s literature and what it can say about gender (among other matters), of particular concern is its ability to present ‘singular cases while relying

10 Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction

on a generalizing force that is left implicit’ (Culler, p. 35). Literature provides a useful way of thinking about issues that concern critical theory as its language can be persuasive and seductive, and once captivated by (or released from) its aesthetic charms we can participate in a number of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) describes as dialogic relationships between text, reader, critic, and cultural context. In a similar way, the ‘language’ of film and other popular cultural texts invites dialogic encounters about the politics of representation and the politics of production and reception. Fictional texts for children and young people assume a particular kind of reader/viewer: a person who is not an adult, but one who, because of his/her child/youth status, will have certain knowledges, attitudes, and beliefs about the world. Of course, this ‘ideal’ reader is often a false or flawed assumption. In making assumptions about child readers, we also need to remain mindful of how children participate in diverse discourse communities (school, family, church, peer groups, and so on) which offer a variety of subject positions. Consequently, any claims to the power of children’s literature to influence readers need to be tempered by the understanding that children’s texts are only one part of the many discourses that readers inhabit at any one time. When writers of children’s literature glibly say that they write for ‘the child within’ (presumably, within the adult writer’s body/mind), they are speaking about the ideal or implied readers whom their texts seek to address. This notion does not need further debunking as others have already taken writers to task for this misguided but well-intentioned sentiment. Perhaps a more interesting observation is one raised by Misson and Morgan (2006) with respect to a familiar claim by readers that ‘this book changed my life’. As these authors suggest, the claim is incontestable, and it does point to the ways in which texts may provide readers (or viewers in the case of film) with an opportunity to see the world afresh, or indeed to see themselves in a different light. This potential power to position readers in particular ways, to take up certain subject positions, is a line of argument that runs through the following chapters. However, I am also mindful that readers are far from passive consumers as they too have agency in exerting their readers’ privilege to negotiate and refuse the propositions and positions texts offer. In terms of the subject of this book, children’s texts provide a rich array of materials for complicating various ideological and political accounts of gender and sexuality, and for engaging in questions about subjectivity, difference, agency, and desire. These concepts – identity, subjectivity, difference, agency, and desire – recur throughout the


chapters of this book and provide a consistency of thematic engagement. These concepts derive from different and often competing theoretical frameworks (for example, psychoanalytic, feminist, aesthetic, queer, postcolonial). My account of the relationship between subject and the social context emerges through an analysis of how the discourses that represent this relationship are played out in a series of contemporary children’s and YA texts. Although ‘children’s literature’, as a generic label for these texts, is a genre with distinct formal characteristics, its examples often represent explicit social and political practices, and as such are responsive to the conditions of their production. My position is that children’s literature and film signify inseparably from their social and cultural contexts of production, but their contexts of reception are immensely varied. My analysis of texts therefore seeks to understand how the primary texts I have selected respond to these everchanging contexts. To achieve this I focus on how these contexts are expressed through the discourses circulating within a novel, a picture book, or a film, and through the subjective points of view that narrative expresses. I examine how the narrative practices of these contemporary texts about gender – the dilemmas, disruptions, and resolutions that they express – invite us (unwittingly perhaps) to examine them within the dialectics of theory and practice.

Outside looking in Rather than engage at length with the tensions and conflicts that the subject of ‘gender’ and the ‘gendered subject’ generate among theorists, I want to outline my position, which draws generally, but not exclusively, on Judith Butler’s work, particularly in Undoing Gender (2004) and her other influential texts including Gender Trouble (1990a) and Bodies That Matter (1993). One of the characteristics of Butler’s work, that is both frustrating and fruitful in terms of her style and disciplinary range, is that she likes to pose questions, raise dilemmas, and point out paradoxes when considering a proposition or highlighting a theoretical impasse. This approach is not unlike the one I adopt in this book. To begin, gender is a term with a history. It is also a term, which for some time now, has become increasingly flexible and difficult to pin down. One part of the historical transition from the use of ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ saw the two terms as interchangeable or one collapsing into the other. As Buchbinder says, collapsing gender into sex blurs the distinction between the social and the biological (1998, p. 39). In terms of masculinity, Buchbinder notes that despite the best efforts of the


mythopoetic proponents, such as Robert Bly, to help men and boys find the ‘deep masculine’ by affirming that ‘biology is destiny’, critical theories support, in general, the notion that gender is culturally constructed. But the universal or common usage of ‘gender’ is not without problems, as universalising practices can be ‘a cover for a certain epistemological imperialism, insensitive to cultural texture and difference’ (Butler, 2004, p. 182). How then does a seemingly simple and commonly used concept such as gender cause problems? As a political signifier, gender means different things to different groups and within different groups. Similarly, ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ are signifiers that are differentially connected to ‘gender’ but their meanings are not necessarily self-present or ultimately defined. Gender, feminism, feminist are also unfixed signifiers that change according to time and place. The successive waves of feminism that have occurred from the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries (First Wave), late 1950s– early 1980s (Second Wave), and since the early 1990s (Third Wave) have not offered a unified ‘voice’ in terms of the different positions women in each movement have held, but they nevertheless can be seen as signifying narratives that conflate femininity/gender with political power. One can suggest with some degree of confidence that many liberal and socialist feminists who comprised the First and Second Waves were united in their attempts to ensure that women gained equal recognition to men in society. Their arguments were against the naturalistic and biological presumptions about women’s rightful role as mothers and carers and their inherently emotional and sensitive predispositions; such presumptions were the basis on which many social, political, and legal precedents were made and enacted. Second Wave Feminism, with its activism based on equality discourses, was taken up in fiction written for children and young adults. One of the most visible outcomes of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of children’s publishing was the emergence of headstrong and powerful female characters. Both mainstream and feminist publishing houses attempted to fill the gap created by the Boys’ Own-style stories by publishing books where girls were central to the plot and not subsidiaries to male adventurers. These early texts attempted, in an Althusserian sense, to ‘hail’ (Hey, you!) girls to take on the world, with support from aphorisms such as ‘Girls can do anything’ appearing on car bumper bars, women’s toilets, school noticeboards, and equity newsletters. Whereas Second Wave Feminism was accused of being for white, middle-class women, Third Wave Feminism attended to the politics of difference and has been inclusive of women regardless of race, culture,


and class. The emphasis on deconstruction and difference that postmodernism and post-structuralism posit helped to reinforce criticisms of Second Wave Feminism by women of colour, Third World feminists, and lesbian feminists for its failure to address different sites of oppression and different sites of struggle (Brooks, 1997, pp. 16–17). However, both movements in their different ways have been unable to resolve the theoretical and practical contestations that persist around gender, sexuality, domestic and workplace equality. Apart from these unresolved tensions between theory and practice, the instabilities of signifiers surrounding ‘woman’/‘women’, ‘feminism’/‘feminist’ and their relation to historically constituted contexts and embodied subjects raise a paradox in feminisms’ arguments: ‘if women cannot be characterised in any general way, if all there is to femininity is socially produced, how can feminism be taken seriously?’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 55). The arguments do not become less complex in more recent evolutions of feminism such as post-feminism and cyberfeminism. These developments still retain a focus on feminine subjectivities and embodiment, but each brings fresh dilemmas that arise with respect to gender and its relationship to consumer capitalism and technology. Thus, signifiers such as ‘postfeminist’/‘postfeminism’, ‘cyberfeminist’/‘cyberfeminism’ continue to carry meanings that remain uncertain and ‘deferred’ (Derrida, 1976). These dilemmas and elusive meanings are explored in the chapters that follow. For queer theories, an area that is characterised by its own internal differences, sex and sexuality form the object of enquiry, while gender and sexuality ‘persist in a state of mutually exclusive tension’ (Butler, 2004, p. 184). This tension arises because queer theorists see gender as a metonym for feminism, and argue that any seeming coherence of gender as a category for dividing men/women, girls/boys simply reinforces what Adrienne Rich (1980) has called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, that is, the ways in which heterosexuality as an oppressive, social institution requires women (and men) to be heterosexual. Queer theory (before it became necessary to speak of in terms of the plural) arose from feminist, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories and their various investigations into the category of the subject. As with the above account regarding the problematic and shifting nature of subjects such as ‘female’, queer theories similarly deconstruct ‘the subject’ (female, male, gay, lesbian), ‘affirming the indeterminacy and instability of all gendered and sexed identities’ (Salih, 2002, p. 9). This dilemma surrounding the ‘subject’ is central to Butler’s work, which examines the formation of the subject within discourses that carry sexed and gendered power relations.


A further dilemma that the terms gender, sexual difference and sex cause is ‘the permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end’ (Butler, 2004, p. 185). How do these exist in relation to one another? While this is a question without a definite answer, a critical way of thinking about them is through the body. The body is a focus for numerous theorists. Among them the work by Kristeva (1982), Foucault (1975), and Wittig (1992) has alerted us to the ways in which the body becomes abjected, regulated, and transgressive. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) has argued that bodies are different, no matter how much they might share similar identity categories, such as gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Her listing of 13 categories of sexual identification is an attempt to break free from the homo/hetero/bisexual triad. While Butler concedes that there is such a thing as a ‘physical body’ she agrees that like gender and sex, the body is produced by discourses, and there is no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This returns us to Butler’s point about performativity quoted earlier, that gender is not something one is, but something one does, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’. Performativity is the most influential and controversial aspect of Butler’s work. In Gender Trouble, Butler states that ‘gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (Butler, 1990a, p. 25). However, her claims about performativity and the proposition that the one doing the gender is a fiction imposed on the doing raises further dilemmas. As Sara Salih asks: ‘How can there be a performance without a performer, an act without an actor?’ (2002, p. 63). As Salih goes on to explain, Butler is not claiming that gender is a performance: ‘The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake’ (Butler, 1993, p. 234). This aspect is probably the most misinterpreted in academic writing on the subject. Culler contends that performativity is a ‘focal point for questions about agency and identity’ (2007, p. 140) and more importantly for those of us interested in literature, he considers literature itself as performative as ‘it takes its place among the acts of language that bring into being what they name’ (p. 145). As I have stated, my intention is to consider how gender is constructed through language and discourse, and how literary discourse provides us with a means to attend to what literary language ‘does’ as well as what it ‘says’. In considering how performativity can be understood in relation to children’s fiction, John Stephens explains: Performativity in fiction … as distinct from performance, operates in a more metaphorical sense: readers recognize that a character is being


depicted as ‘performing an act’, in a metaphorical sense, because we recognize a behavioural ritual which inheres in culture prior to the construction of this character. In other words, the character is constructed in accordance with, and so plays out, recognizable performatives. (2006, p. 5) The ‘recognizable performatives’ Stephens mentions are illustrated in his article with examples from fiction where writers reiterate gender performatives through ‘the process of character construction and in story conventions’ (p. 5). To take up Culler’s point and Stephens’s examples, we need also to consider how literary texts are themselves performatives in the way they tell readers about the world by ‘bringing into being the characters and events they relate’ (p. 152). To return to The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, Tyke’s actions betoken masculine performativity, and both Kemp and Tyke engage in a linguistic performativity connected to gender. These two elements – speech acts and bodily acts – are central to Butler’s notion of performativity. Gender is a series of acts that brings into being what it names and, in Kemp’s text, produces a ‘masculine’ girl. The fact that the story first conceals and later reveals through linguistic play what readers perceived to be a ‘boy’ is in fact a ‘girl’ demonstrates how language establishes the coherence of these categories in order to perpetuate and maintain a gender binary. It also demonstrates how cultural constructions of gender inscribe and define the body. Tyke’s failure to conform to readers’ expectations of gender binarisms reveals the instability of gender and troubles gender and any claims to its naturalness. According to Butler, gender identities are constructed and constituted by language, which means that there is no gender identity that precedes language. What The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler attempts to do is call into question the norms of gender behaviour (what Stephens terms ‘a redescription of norms’) and to open out possibilities for agency and subversion. Agency and subversion are crucial concepts for unravelling the dilemmas of gender; discussions of these acts in children’s texts are taken up in the subsequent chapters. Agency is a pivotal element in most fiction for young people and it is invariably linked to the issue of subjectivity and gendered identity. As Hayles says, ‘to count as a person, an entity must be able to exercise agency. Agency enables the subject to make choices, express intentions, perform actions’ (2005, p.172). While some postmodern critics argue that agency is an attribute of the liberal humanist (unified) subject, Butler’s reconceptualisation of identity as


an effect that is produced or generated opens up the possibilities of agency (1990a, p. 147). Rather than regard the prospect of human agency as an impossibility within a determinist view of social constructivist frameworks, Butler locates agency in the variation of action or the possibility of variation in the repetition of acts. In this respect we can see Tyke as having agency in her ability to perform against the stylised acts and repetitions that come to constitute a notion of ‘femininity’. However, her non-conformity and subjection to regulation by school authorities limit agency and illustrate a feature common to teen film, that the path to agency can often lead to abjection (see Stephens, 2003, pp. 123–37). Subversion, as a strategy for destabilising gender, is one that often fails in children’s literature and film. The examples of gender-switching through cross-dressing (e.g. Bill’s New Frock by Anne Fine) or transformations of the ‘sexed’ body (e.g. Virtual Sexuality Reality by Chloë Rayban), or in drag performance (e.g. the film Mrs Doubtfire, and its predecessor Alias, Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine) can be seen as failed performances as their narrative closures of reinstatement of gender norms reinforce existing gender binarisms and sexual hierarchies within a heterosexual and heteronormative framework (see Flanagan, 2007). However, as Chapter 5 demonstrates, some recent YA texts are achieving a destabilising effect in their subversion of heteronormativity, but the extent to which agency can be sustained is still ambiguous if not limited. One area which children’s literature criticism has only begun to examine with respect to agency and the subversion of social norms is the posthuman, whereby humans become posthuman through technological augmentation, genetic engineering, or other cognitive and bodily enhancing technologies (see Ostry, 2004; Stephens, 2006; Bradford et al., 2008). Hayles suggests that fiction with posthuman subjects tends to pose the following questions: Will the posthuman preserve what we continue to value in the liberal subject, or will the transformation into the posthuman annihilate the subject? Will free will and agency still be possible in a posthuman future? Will we be able to recognize ourselves after the change? Will there still be a self to recognize and be recognized? (Hayles, 1999, p. 281) The posthuman subject is taken up in Chapter 3 in my discussion of humans, technologies, and cyborgs.


A detour into desire and pleasure A couple of years ago, I was on a flight from London to Stockholm when the male passenger beside me, dressed in a business suit, opened up his suitcase and produced a newly minted copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Of course, an adult reading Harry Potter is not an isolated or remarkable incident given the phenomenal global success of the Potter series. As I’m not a Potter fan and struggled through the first book only, I was interested to know what this reader found so engaging, and when he finally put the book away as we neared our destination I asked him about this. He said the usual – good old fashioned story, his kids love it, he had read the others in the series, it gets you in – and so on. While an anecdote offers a discrete moment in time, it nevertheless repeats itself in other times and spaces, as I am sure many readers would have experienced a similar situation to mine. My purpose with this anecdote is to raise the concepts of desire and pleasure, which are pertinent to this book’s subject. Both concepts operate within a text as part of the construction of subjectivity; they also form a nexus of engagement between text and reader/viewer. As Misson and Morgan argue, ‘desire is crucial in understanding engagement, pleasure, and the whole process of the discursive-aesthetic construction of subjectivity’ (2006, p. 73). The engagement and pleasure that the man on the plane clearly gained in reading the Harry Potter book illustrates how texts can seduce readers into certain subject positions they construct for their ‘ideal’ readers. Pleasure and desire are travelling companions and reading texts is one activity where we can see pleasure being enacted through laughter, tears, concern, and so forth. We have all witnessed the kinds of pleasure children derive from reading, playing, viewing texts as ‘they move into the subject position such texts construct’ (Misson & Morgan, 2006, p. 72). Desire is both a theoretical concept and a repeated motif of literature. Desire manifests in numerous ways, such as desire for passion, knowledge, friendship, curiosity, creativity, and power. In many fictional texts there is often a dialectic of desire between the object of desire and a desiring subject. In a Lacanian interpretation,2 desire is based on lack, loss, and yearning, and it would seem that Lacan’s narrative is one that is most clearly expressed in romantic fictions of love lost, which often fall within a familiar heterosexual narrative frame. Both Deleuze and Foucault reject the Lacanian notion of desire as characterised by lack and loss. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), desire is generative and productive (‘process of flows and lines of flight’ p. 229) rather than merely subject to prohibition. With respect to the usefulness of a Deleuzian account


of desire in young adult fiction, Kathryn McInally argues that this alternative view of desire provides critics with ‘a vocabulary in which to examine representation of girl-girl desire in more affirmative terms’ (2007, p. 317). An alternative point is found with Foucault (1976), who argues that there is the possibility of subversion within the law itself, that is, within existing discursive structures as these structures both prohibit and produce (taboo) desire. Following this line of argument, Butler contends that heterosexuality requires homosexuality in order to define itself and maintain its internal coherence: ‘Homosexuality emerges as a desire which must be produced in order to remain repressed’ (1990a, p. 77). This position is of course problematic as it assigns homosexuality as the subordinate and pathologised part of the binarism. In a related way, positing a male/female binarism of difference also invites a logic of exclusion (and inclusion), and threatens to consolidate the subordinate position (women/girls) by relegating them to the margins of the dominant social order without challenging the discursive structures that place them there. Lacan’s position regarding the inevitability of paternal law (‘the law of the father’) and his privileging of the phallus to the child’s entry into the Symbolic (language) has produced a deal of controversy among feminists, mainly because of the patriarchal assumptions that underpin his discourse. However, Elizabeth Grosz assesses Lacan’s contribution to feminism as being useful in terms of the shift from biology to language. For Lacan: ‘unconscious, desire, and sexuality are not effects of nature, biology, or some human essence, but are consequences of the human subject’s constitution in and by the symbolic and the imaginary’ (Grosz, 1990, p. 78). Lacan challenges the notion of the autonomous, ready-made subject by arguing that the subject is socio-linguistically constituted. Children’s literature critics have also found value in Lacan’s work with respect to subjectivity and the feminine subject (see Wilkie-Stibbs, 2002). Thus, both theorisations of desire have relevance for children’s literature. As Misson and Morgan explain: When we consider how texts answer to our desires and we become involved in them, it is perhaps easiest to think in terms of Lacan and the ways in which the texts are making up for what we lack … It is also possible that texts are providing material for us to work on productively, that we engage with texts not because they make up for lack in our lives, but because they allow us to generate more exciting and pleasurable thoughts and feelings. (Misson & Morgan, 2006, p. 75)


Freudian and Lacanian analyses held sway in early feminist criticism, particularly in their analysis of the representation of women in literature and film. They considered how seeing is constructed in ways that position viewers as spectators and females as objects of the gaze (see Mulvey, 1975). However, there has been a move away from binary understanding of sexual difference to an interest in the multiplicity of identities, desires, sexualities, and possible spectatorships (Tasker, 1998). Texts which complicate the notion of ‘who looks/sees?’ open up ways for overcoming neat binarisations between (male) spectator and (female) spectacle. Before considering other ways of seeing, I want to retrace briefly Mulvey’s original argument as it provides a good starting point to subsequent chapters. Since the time of Mulvey’s influential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’ (1975), visual pleasure has come under scrutiny, particularly with its inextricable ties to a patriarchal system of gender hierarchy. Mulvey’s original argument was that in classic realist cinema, ‘woman’ is constituted as image and as such is the object to-belooked-at while the male is constituted as the bearer of the gaze. These two positions produce contradictory viewing pleasures – scopophilia, which arouses sexual stimulation and objectifies the person looked at, and narcissism, which Mulvey describes as a process of identification with the image on the screen. In its simplest terms, this means that men are presented as active, heroic figures who offer narcissistic identification, while women are the objects of spectacle. This masculine gendering of the gaze is tied to cultural constructions and representations of femininity, whereby ‘woman’ is the ‘other’, rendering her difference to man, as ‘the non-male, the lacking, supplementary body’ (Bronfen, 1992, p. 122). Men’s access to Western culture is represented as one of vicarious sexual voyeurism. Alternatively, women are meant to look at their visual representations so that they are instructed in the ways of femininity. While Mulvey’s argument opened our eyes to the sexual dynamic of looking by exposing the gaze of the white, heterosexual male as masquerading as a universal scopic regime, we are still caught between a rock and a hard place as we try to wriggle out of the opposing positions of narcissistic identification and voyeuristic objectification. Are there other ways of looking? Mulvey later revised her original thesis in ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”’ (1981) by proposing that if cinematic representation were a site of fantasy (desire), then it might offer the female spectator multiple subject positions which enable the female spectator to take up active and passive positions by exploring female


subjectivity and desire. This line of argument disrupts the masculine point of view and the passive (feminine)/active (masculine) binary. Her discussion provided a way for considering how a visual representation might evoke an unsettling and confronting looking, whereby the viewer is suspended between objectification and identification. Also, what happens when the male body is the erotic object of the gaze? This question and others are taken up by (post-)feminist, lesbian, and queer theorists and filmmakers. The dilemma for (post-)feminist and lesbian filmmakers then has been how to establish female subjectivity while at the same time deconstructing patriarchal representations of femininity and the female subject. Given that narrative and visual pleasure continue to be the basis for viewers’ identification and engagement with film and literature, desire seems to be released from its mooring in psychoanalysis to float free in newly charted waters: ones where feminist and other critics, writers and filmmakers have undertaken daring and experimental navigating. This recuperation of desire brings its own contradictory subject positions for viewers, which do not foreclose a critique of social constructions of gender and its power relations. The spate of filmic action girls embodied in Buffy, Lara Croft, and Zena have been an attempt to hit back (literally). My own ambivalent view of this particular manifestation of post-femininity is that these action girls along with others proliferating throughout popular culture advocate new forms of ‘go-girl’ femininity, forms which nevertheless continue to seduce girls into femininity by making the female subject desire femininity, albeit a particular form of agential femininity that kicks butt while wearing stilettos. In a similar way, the deployment of the femme fatale in children’s films such as 101 Dalmations (1996) and The Little Mermaid (1989) provides the space whereby the dangerous woman’s active desire manifests itself in her determination to gain power or the man, at all costs (see Sells, 1995; Mallan, 2000). In both instances, the woman as fantasy object and subject relies on her phallic attributes of power, dominance, control, and economic capital to make herself both the object of desire and the desiring subject. It is this doubly coded desire, that offers a space for female and male viewing pleasure, and finds a place in post-feminist discourses as well as in box-office sales. Psychoanalytic film theory has also been criticised by queer critics for its restrictive dichotomies and its exclusive focus on sexual difference. Butler’s view that the subject of desire is ‘the product of a prohibition’ (1987, p. 87) takes note of both Lacanian and queer perspectives. What queer theorists and filmmakers have brought to the


subject of desire is a counter-approach to popular culture which offers identifications and pleasures that dominant culture denies or prohibits to GLBTI (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual, Intersex)3 subjects. In this respect, Butler’s (1990a) point that performativity enables us to see gender as enacting a set of discontinuous if not parodic performances has value. Queer texts and criticism are often inflected with irony and parody as they celebrate transgressive gender and deconstructed subjectivities. However, there is a tendency in YA novels and films to juggle notions of oppression and liberation without a whiff of irony or parodic playfulness. As Trites notes with respect to YA novels about gay males: ‘all too often the rhetoric these texts employ to construct gay discourse is more repressive than liberatory’ (2000, p. 103). However, as Chapter 4 discusses, queer desire is often represented in fiction for young people within the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Even when such texts challenge the hierarchical nature of that binary by showing up its discriminating, demeaning, and destructive enforcement, there is still no space for questioning the binary itself. However, change is occurring in that these texts are attempting to offer more transgressive characters. Hall (2003) offers a useful perspective on queer theory and its interpretative practices. He considers queer texts as providing textual evidence whereby notions of sexual normality are denaturalised and human sexual desire is in excess of the hetero/homo binary. As he explains: Such ‘queer’ texts offer characters, themes, plot situations, narratorial expressions, and symbolic representations that undermine the fixed, ‘natural’ status of the identifiers ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’, and thereby expose the reductiveness and constructedness of binarily defined sexual identity, ‘orientation’, and/or classification systems. (Hall, 2003, pp. 149–50) Hall urges critics to undertake their own queer readings, even of those texts which are seemingly ‘straight’, as, he argues, all texts have ‘queer internal aspects, traces, and resonances’ (p. 148). I have attempted to take up Hall’s invitation throughout the chapters that follow. To date, children’s literature criticism is still only at an early stage of interrogating the norms of identity by applying a queer readerly approach to texts (see, for example: Flanagan, 2007; Lefebvre, 2005; Mallan, 2004; Pennell & Stephens, 2002; Kidd, 2001; Trites, 1998).


Dilemmas of ‘race’ Psychoanalytic theory has also been criticised for its failure to deal with racial difference. ‘Race’ is a term which, Salih says, ‘is problematic, unstable and by no means self-evident’ (2002, p. 76). Racial identity raises further dilemmas in terms of how to theorise the body with respect to analyses of gender, sexuality, and sex (and other attributes). Rather than see ‘race’ as a separate issue that impacts on the subject, Butler and others argue that race, gender, and sexuality are mutually constitutive as they are vectors of power that intersect and operate simultaneously, and do not work in isolation from each other. In other words, ‘interpellations do not just “call us” into sex, sexuality and gender, but they are also “racializing” imperatives that institute racial difference as a condition of subjecthood’ (Salih, 2002, p. 93). A pertinent and, unfortunately, a familiar example of how racial difference makes a difference in a negative sense is offered by Winnubst: The phrase ‘boys will be boys’ tells us, white males are permitted innumerable, socially acceptable transgressions of the law (presumably they occur at the designated time of life, early adulthood); but black males fill our prisons more quickly than they fill our college classrooms. This process of subjectivation via transgression, in turn, becomes fraught with anxiety: anxiety enlivens subjectivity, attuning it to the nuanced borders and contours of the law. (Winnubst, 2006, p. 121) Children’s film and literature have captured other instances of such a ‘process of subjectivation’. If we accept the narrative offered by the Australian YA novel Deadly Unna? (Gwynne, 1998) as an accurate representation of an unjust double standard of how black youth receives differential treatment in the eyes of both society and the law, then this text gives a vivid illustration of how the process of subjectivation works. Two Aboriginal boys are shot and killed during a burglary that goes wrong. The white boy the white boy (ironically named ‘Blacky’) arrives at the scene just after the shooting and enquires about the incident to the gathering crowd: ‘Who got shot?’ I said. ‘Dunno.’ ‘Nobody knows.’


‘Boongs, that’s all I know.’ ‘Serves ’em right, I reckon.’ (p. 194) Later Blacky, who was a friend of Dumby, who was shot, asks: ‘But they didn’t deserve to get killed, did they? Dumby was just a kid like me’ (p. 206). The fact that Dumby was an Aboriginal boy who lived in the mission on the outskirts of a country town divided along racial lines meant that he was not ‘just like’ his friend. In the eyes of many of the racist people in the town, Aboriginal people are denied the status of subject at all, they are just ‘boongs’ who deserve what they get. The pub owner who shot and killed the boys in a panic leaves the town but ‘no charges were expected to be laid against him’ (p. 203). In terms of my previous discussion of the gaze, we may ask how ‘seeing’ and the object of the gaze are mutually constructed within dominant cultural and artistic conventions and discourses, and how they sanction/disavow voyeurism. This point is vividly illustrated in Tom Feelings’s illustrated text The Middle Passage (1995). The black-andwhite illustrations comprise a series of harrowing tableaux depicting the suffering by the slaves as they endure a torturous journey from West Africa to colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. The illustrations of the black male and female bodies draw our gaze and we are caught up in an aesthetic unease as horror mixes with a perverse aestheticism as we scrutinise the human form – its limbs, torso, face, gesture – and its gendered and racialised discursive visibility (Mallan, 2002, pp. 45–6). Bill Pinar provides another compelling example from America’s history – the lynching of black men. These ‘spectacles’ of black male bodies dangling like ‘strange fruit’ would draw crowds of people and were ‘sometimes more widely attended than a county fair’ (2000, p. 3). As Pinar argues, these lynchings were tied to a ‘gendered system of organized racial terror in America’ (p. 3). The ‘rape myth’ which accompanied black males told of their voracious animalistic sexuality.4 Similar myths accompany black women. With reference to Hollywood cinema, Tasker (1998) notes that black women are routinely constructed as marginalised characters such as prostitutes. Ironically, the black body as a sign of potent sexuality is elided in other instances (for example, as reliable and loyal nannies, housekeepers, chauffeurs) where the body is stripped of sexuality becoming a neutered space inscribed by benign discourses of celibacy or asexuality. These contrasting stereotypes, like all stereotypes, fail to speak of the differences that exist within their totalising representations. Throughout this book I


endeavour to enquire into these silent particularities and consider how they fail to acknowledge or even raise other possibilities that might be at play in the narratives. In her study of contemporary Australian children’s literature and representations of race, Clare Bradford (2001) notes that few texts contest cultural norms that stand in the way of romantic and sexual relationships between Aboriginal and white characters. With reference to bell hooks’s comment that, traditionally, Hollywood delivers a tragic message about interracial sex as doomed to failure, Bradford suggests that more often than not Australian texts for children and adolescents promote similar ideologies (p. 106). Apart from Bradford’s examination of inter-racial sexual relations, it would seem that children’s literature criticism is quiet on the topic; furthermore, the issue of race and sexuality is absent in discourses of sexuality, gender, and power as the focus tends to be on white heterosexuality or white homosexuality (see Trites, 2000). This preliminary discussion has attempted to map the contours of the theoretical framework of this book. I have raised some of the key concepts and dilemmas that the following chapters pursue in more detail with their focused examination of examples drawn from contemporary children’s literature and film. I now consider the limits that I have placed on text selection, and the limits that characterise the genre of children’s literature as well as its possibilities for change and rethinking gender.

Limits and possibilities In raising the dilemmas of gender, I want to explore the ways modes of containment that enclose bodies and restrict and choreograph the performative acts they enact relate to dominant understandings of freedom, specifically freedom from prohibition. Narratives written for children and young adults often speak of limits and boundaries. Faced with a readership that is itself the subject of legal and adult limits, limits operate on both the writer and the text. The limits that operate in children’s fictional texts with respect to subject matter, language, and format are being pushed and pulled, at once breaking away and retreating. This is particularly evident in notions of how far to push the limits imposed on gender and sexuality. These limits I believe are self-imposed by the genre (and its creators) as well as imposed by other socio-cultural, political, and religious pressures. I have touched upon the way a limit functions dynamically


within a text to incite desire by establishing a dynamic between a desiring subject and a desired object. The prohibitions placed on the enactment of erotic desires produce particular kinds of subjectivities. For example, in the YA novel Obsession (Lawrinson, 2001), Charlotte’s desire for Kate is pathologised as in need of psychiatric help resulting in a docile and compliant subjectivity that results from the anxiety her desire for another girl produced in both herself and others. By contrast, there is an agential subjectivity produced when the two girls in the Swedish film Fucking Åmål (a.k.a. Show me Love) defiantly and victoriously declare their sexual attraction for each other in front of an assembled and stunned school community (see Mallan & Stephens, 2002). However, Regan’s brother Liam/Luna (Luna by Julie Anne Peters, 2005) disrupts the oppositional logic of heterosexism by occupying the liminal space of a transsexual, thus failing to signify as either male or female. Consequently, Luna is subjected to physical and psychological violence for being gendered ambiguously. These texts are, ultimately, about freedom, the freedom to desire without prohibition and the freedom to enact subjectivity without constraint. For Butler, prohibition is productive (as noted previously, a view shared by Foucault). In her discussion of the way the military in the US renounces homosexual desire, Butler, in Excitable Speech (1997a), argues that the act of renouncing is a way of preserving that desire: ‘it is retained in the speaking of the prohibition’ (p. 117). In a similar way, children’s and YA texts speak of prohibition and the discourses and structures which contribute to states of confusion, repression, and celebration. Just how these texts manage to ex-cite readers into thinking about literature and film as cultural sites of gender construction is the driving motivation behind this book. The following chapters explore ways in which a selection of contemporary children’s texts re-inscribe and resignify gendered bodies within and beyond the discursive limits imposed by their location within culture and through the narrative limits of their creation. Apart from my earlier reference to Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, my approach to text selection is to consider a range of fiction and film published since 1990 to the time of writing (2008). This is my attempt to see how the field is changing in what are euphemistically termed ‘new times’. Of course, I realise that contemporaneity is also subject to limits and what is new today will seem outdated tomorrow. However, my determination to search out recently published books was an attempt to write about texts that have so far received little or no critical attention. I have also attempted to include texts from a range of English-speaking


countries – Australia, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa. Given my limited access to translated works and my own limitations with languages other than English, I have only included one example from a country where English is not the dominant language, namely Japan. My selection covers a diverse range of examples drawn from various genres, media, and formats – picture books, novels, films, and websites. Each chapter begins with an epigraph raising a dilemma, or a question that leads to a dilemma. This device is of course a narrative ploy to demonstrate that I have control over the dilemmas I discuss and that they are not going to unravel or disappear as the chapters pick up momentum. However, they do hopefully serve a point for thinking about some of the dilemmas that thread through the lives of children and young people and which are given a different perspective through literature, song, and other venues of popular culture. As the following chapter overviews suggest, I have framed the key dilemmas I have discussed above in relation to gendered subject positions, new gender relations, and sexualities around organising themes of desire, aesthetics, technology, queer, and comedy. Several sub-dilemmas and contestations are also raised throughout the chapters. In ‘Desire, Pleasure, and Romance: Post-feminism and Other Seductions’ I examine how various fictional texts in this chapter engage with desire and how different genres such as romance have responded to desire over time. My analysis considers the desires that social and cultural norms carry, and how these desires impact on the characters’ subjectivities and ability to live fulfilling lives. The overarching question that guides this chapter is: What does gender desire? In ‘The Beauty Dilemma: Gendered Bodies and Aesthetic Judgement’ I analyse how texts variously engage readers/viewers in the contradictory discourses of beauty as desirable and dangerous. In considering youth’s location and investment in the beauty scene, this chapter also considers the other side of beauty by exploring examples of texts that celebrate an aesthetics of disgust. By engaging with discourses of beauty and ugliness (refinement and disgust), my aim here is to investigate how these extremes are used in texts to disrupt or confirm dominant gender norms. My interest in bodies continues in ‘Gendered Cyber-Bodies: The Dilemma of Technological “Existenz”’. By utilising the philosophical term ‘existenz’, a term which refers to how one realises one’s personal meaning in life, I examine how existence/existenz is mediated when real and virtual blur. Here my focus is on the complex relationship between technology and bodies and what this relationship means


for reconsidering notions of dis/embodiment, self and subjectivity as mind in/out of bodies. As the chapter title, ‘Queer Spaces in a Straight World: The Dilemma of Sexual Identity’, suggests, I explore the dilemmas, contestations, and tensions that surround sexuality. The central question that informs this chapter is what happens when gender and sexual identities do not conform to the dominant system of heterosexuality? By working with a queer approach to narrative, I identify queer moments or spaces in the texts where the represented content is about resignifying normativity by destabilising ‘naturalised’ identity categories. Furthermore, I distinguish between those performatives that are subversive of dominant discourses and those that work to consolidate or strengthen them. In ‘No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender’ I examine how various forms of the comic (parody, satire, the grotesque, and so on) illuminate the dynamic of gender and sexuality at play in the narratives I have selected. By reading the seriocomic elements through theories of performativity, queer, and other strategies, I contend that we can think about the ambivalent pleasures the texts offer and whether they destabilise and/or maintain the social norms and organisation of gender. Finally, I want to acknowledge the influences and contributions of intellectual communities both inside and outside of children’s literature studies, which influence and shape my ideas. These influences will become apparent in the following chapters. I acknowledge that the bringing together of complementary and competing viewpoints is not without its problems. But like a good dinner party, their coming together in the one place will hopefully make the experience a worthwhile one. Thus, this book, like all texts, is part of a citational chain that is forged by what has preceded it, and hopefully it will become a link in successive chains of the future.

1 Desire, Pleasure, and Romance: Post-Feminism and Other Seductions

What is it in all the world that women most desire? (Joanna Troughton, Sir Gawain and the Loathly Damsel, 1972) What is it that causes men to ponder this question? Do women ask this question of themselves? Or do they know what they desire and therefore consider the question redundant? Does the reiteration of this question throughout time and across popular culture, psychology, theology, philosophy, and literature mean that we have failed to find the answer? Common sense tells us that women desire different things. This knowledge, however, does not seem to call a halt to the question which continues to be the holy grail of masculinity’s quest for domination or redemption: both are possible motivations. If we switch the gender subject of the question would women claim to know the answer? Or would they not bother finding out? It seems to me that asking ‘what is it that men most desire?’ lacks the sexual intrigue, the implicit thread, that runs through the question and wraps itself around the heart of attempts to answer it. Working within a Post-feminist/Third Wave Feminist context, this chapter explores how various narratives for young people construct desire and how it is played out as part of uneasy gender relations. Desire is the structuring principle of literature in that it drives a narrative and seduces readers by working on their own expectations, anticipations, and need for fulfilment of desires. The texts I have selected for this chapter structure desire in different ways by casting it as the driving motivation behind the characters’ quests for independence, adventure, sexual freedom, love and romance. Some of the texts can be classified broadly as romance fiction, others are more correctly mutations or variants of this genre. 28

Desire, Pleasure, and Romance 29

Romance is a genre which has endured from its medieval beginnings to modern equivalents in fantasy, science fiction, detective stories, gothic novels, and popular love stories. The evolution of the genre over time has seen it engage with themes from courtly love to democratic relationships, from heroics to parodic misadventure. This listing across genre demonstrates the variety of romance tales; however, variety is also experienced within romances from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. Despite its generic diversity, romance narratives share common motifs, such as exile and return, love, quest and adventure, family, and identity. There are also recognisably familiar characters who inhabit romances, ‘heroes and heroines, figures distinguished from the everyday by their ideal quality, and offset by similarly extreme negative figures’ (Saunders, 2004, p. 2). While both early and contemporary parodies of romance undermine this tradition by presenting readers with bumbling heroes, feisty damsels, and comic villains, part of the enduring appeal of romance for readers may lie in both its opportunities for escapism and its ‘incisive social reflection and comment’ (Saunders, 2004, p. 2). However, not all romances include ‘incisive’ social comments, preferring instead to take a more psychological exploration of their protagonists and their internal and external worlds. The example of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1967) is arguably a quest romance tale with its story of exile and return, quest and adventure. Some critics have read this picture book in terms of psychological understandings of the ego, in its taming of ‘little-boy anger’ (Thompson, cited by Kidd, 2004, p. 156). Romance has this capacity to open up worlds of enchantment, trauma, dream, and symbol. For even its youngest readers, romance explores the deep-seated fears and pleasures of the human psyche. In focusing on how the various fictional texts in this chapter engage with desire, my examination inevitably considers the desires of the characters. But it also considers the desires that social and cultural norms carry, and how these desires impact on the characters’ subjectivities and ability to live fulfilling lives. Given these norms and individuals’ desires, the overarching question that guides this chapter is: What does gender desire?

The answer! In the Arthurian tale cited in the epigraph, Sir Gawain comes to understand that what women desire is sovereignty. Tricked into marrying an ugly crone, Sir Gawain feels pity for the grotesque woman and kisses


her on their wedding night. The kiss transforms the grotesque into a beauty (Lady Ragnell). But this is only the first part of the test, for his wife then tells him: ‘But you must now choose, whether you wish me to be loathly by day when all the world can see me, or by night when we are alone together. Beautiful by day, or beautiful by night’. Gawain responds: ‘It is you who will suffer most, my lady, so let the choice be yours’ (Troughton, 1972, unpaged). His words break the spell completely and the path to wedded bliss is opened. The allegorical motif of the ‘loathly lady’ appears in numerous stories and the outcome of the story attests to the power of female subjectivity, while attempting to destabilise gender norms. But many of these tales also have a Bildungsroman quality, as the male protagonist moves from a state of conflict to a changed relationship between male and female. Consequently, the male protagonist achieves a revised identity and the hierarchical power relations between the genders are redressed. There is a twist to the loathly lady motif in the children’s film, Shrek (2001), which draws on familiar tropes and citations of romance with its eclectic intertextual mixing of popular music, fairy tales, and medieval romance. The film’s metafictive and parodic playfulness irreverently subverts the conventions of romance, although as I have explained there is a literary tradition of the genre’s conventions being disrupted through irony and comedy. The ‘loathly lady’ is the karate-kicking Princess Fiona and the benign-looking ogre named Shrek is the unlikely hero. The film begins with Shrek reading from an old storybook that begins with ‘Once upon a time’: the words printed in the style of an illuminated manuscript place viewers within the frame of a familiar story genre. However, when the words tell that a princess trapped in a tower ‘waits for her true love and love’s first kiss’, Shrek breaks the spell of the romance by ripping the page from the book and using it as toilet paper. The film demonstrates romance narrative’s own capacity for shape changing – it is a self-conscious parody, a comedy, as well as a love story. Shrek, the self-confessed ‘ugly, stupid ogre’, embarks on a quest characteristic of medieval romance to rescue Princess Fiona from the tower. However, his motivation does not arise from some higher knightly purpose but is out of self-interest – to get back the deed of his ‘swamp’ into which the corrupt Lord Farquaad has released all the fairy-tale characters he has captured. The film’s ironic twist on the loathly lady motif occurs in the form of Princess Fiona who has had a spell cast on her from when she was a baby – ‘By night one way, by day another’. But when Shrek finally sees Fiona in her true ogre physical form, he is


not repelled by her ugliness, but sees a mirror image of his (feminine) other. This is a crucial difference between Shrek and the Gawain tale. A feature that both tales share is that while the hero is transformed into a loving and tender partner, the heroine’s subjectivity does not transform but remains in relation to the masculine other. Princess Fiona is not so clearly a (post-)feminist subject. She fulfils the romance ideal of being a beautiful princess awaiting rescue from her exile in a tower by her one true love. She speaks the words of romance and waits for the first kiss by her one true love. However, once she is rescued and journeys with Shrek and Donkey she proves more than capable of defending herself as she annihilates a number of male attackers with her karate kicks and punches. Nevertheless, marriage is the only course of action Fiona is offered or is prepared to take, whether it be to the dastardly Lord Farquaad or to good-hearted Shrek. Consequently, the ending fulfils her enduring desire to be in love and ‘live happily ever after’. The search for the ‘right’ man (or woman) informs many YA popular and queer romance narratives, particularly those produced in recent decades. In her discussion of YA romance, Trites sees ‘sexuality as a rite of passage [which] is linked with romance’ (2000, p. 84). Trites’s linking of sexuality and romance as a rite of passage is an accurate depiction of many YA romances. As I mentioned above, many YA novels follow the European model of (white male) Bildungsroman or a female version of it where the rite of passage often entails a quest for one’s ‘true’ self as well as for one’s ‘true’ love. It is probably an accurate assessment to suggest that most feminist Bildungsroman and gay and lesbian ‘coming out’ fiction tend to link gender and sexual identity with a similar finding of an essential self (and an equally essential other). The significant aspect of many romance narratives and particularly the loathly lady tales for this discussion is the emphasis on the body as a site of desire and subjectivity. As Carter (2003, p. 338) notes, ‘the loathly lady motif, with sovereignty itself represented by the manyshaped female body, might remind us that the body is the foundation of cultural constructions of race, gender, and arguably, identity’. Carter suggests that a double-sidedness exists in these tales: the woman is both lovely and grotesque, but equally the point at which sovereignty is reached and masculine redemption achieved takes place in the marriage bed of heterosexuality. Unlike some literary representations of the woman who lures the male into the ‘snares of heterosexuality’ often to her own disadvantage, the loathly lady trades with patriarchy for the purposes of her own ‘control in sexually active flesh’ (2003, p. 338). Carter argues that in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale the loathly


lady functions as a personification of anxiety about male maturation, representing a rite of passage for the Knight. However, it is a male rite of passage that involves ‘negotiation with the internal passages of the grotesque feminine body, beginning with a kiss’ (p. 338). The narrative resolutions of the loathly lady romances tend to provide a win/win outcome: female subjectivity and control are achieved and unequal power relations are dissolved. Problem solved! But just when we think that Chaucer got it right and solved what is euphemistically known as the ‘battle of the sexes’, other dilemmas emerge in contemporary debates about that elusive term, ‘postfeminism’. In thinking about the dilemmas associated with the reading or viewing of post-feminist romance narratives we are setting up two opposing reading practices: Do we take up the subject positions they offer by reading them as renegotiating female subjectivity and (hetero)sexual relations? Or do we read them ‘against the grain’? Modleski (1982) suggests that to read romance against the grain is to discover their ‘deep structures’, which reiterate existing patriarchal and misogynistic cultures. However, this option between two possibilities forecloses other ways of reading romance within a framework that is not necessarily based on a quasi-Lacanian ‘lack’ and repressed desire. Does post-feminism offer us an alternative framework? Before considering this question in relation to romance narratives for young people, the following section offers an overview of post-feminism as a way of framing the subsequent examination of the texts.

Out, damn’d dilemma! Out, I say! In the Introduction to this book I briefly mentioned some of the ambivalences that ‘post-feminism’ generates. What is post-feminism? Why does it matter? Is it anti-feminist? These questions and others recur in discussions of post-feminism in both popular culture and academe. ‘Post-feminism’ is an elusive and contested term. On the one hand, it suggests that feminism is now passé and that women and the world have moved beyond concerns championed by early feminists. On the other hand, many feminists are concerned that a dismissive attitude to the history of feminist struggle forgets or rejects the gains and nature of the struggle. Sarah Gamble captures the uncertainty that accompanies this term: In the context of popular culture it’s the Spice Girls, Madonna and the Girlie Show: women dressing like bimbos, yet claiming male


privileges and attitudes. Meanwhile, those who wish to maintain an allegiance to more traditional forms of feminism circle around the neologism warily, unable to decide whether it represents a con trick engineered by the media or a valid movement. (Gamble, 2001, p. 36) In discussing post-feminism one needs to be careful not to conceive of it as a monolithic term; to do so would obscure its inherent diversity and take an absolutist stance. While some argue that the term had its origins in the media culture of the 1980s, others, such as Faludi, claim that post-feminism first surfaced in the 1920s press (1992, p. 70). Origins aside for the moment, the most problematic aspect lies with the uncertainty of the prefix and whether it looks to the past (‘after’ feminism) or to the future (‘a continuation of’ feminism). While some claim that the ‘post’ signifies a break from previous patriarchal oppressions, implying that women now have it all, others regard the prefix as continuing the project of feminism through ‘a process of ongoing transformation and change’ (Brooks, 1997, p. 1). Like other movements or theoretical shifts that begin with ‘post’ (postmodernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism), the political-social context that gave rise to its naming is an important consideration. Post-feminism’s birth (or rebirth) in the 1980s was a time characterised in the Western world by uneven global economic growth, the emergence of a new middle class (‘yuppies’), and the end of the Cold War. This period has been negatively evaluated as a time of excessive consumerism and remembered for its hyperbolic fashion styles. It was also a period when female action heroes began to emerge in films and television series with characters such as Ripley in the Alien films, Sarah Connor in Terminator films, and Buffy the vampire slayer of the popular television series of the same name. Children’s literature also attempted to invert gender hierarchies, by promoting female ascendancy. One of the first texts to do this was The Paper Bag Princess (Munsch & Marchenko, 1980). In this now very familiar picture book, Princess Elizabeth sets off on her quest to save the love of her life, the spoilt and shallow Prince Ronald. However, her valiant efforts are not rewarded with a kiss or a thanks, but with a reprimand by Prince Ronald: Elizabeth, you are a mess! You smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you are wearing a dirty old paper bag.


Come back when you are dressed like a real princess. (Munsch & Marchenko, 1980, unpaged) While Elizabeth comes to her senses and gives Ronald the flick, as she dances with gay abandon into the setting sun, the message is clear – marriage is not necessarily the only goal for girls. For many young women and girls growing up in a so-called postfeminist age, with its emphasis on consumerism, sexual freedom, and ‘go-girl’ rhetoric ringing in their ears, it is little wonder that feminism would seem as outdated as a Walkman. This cultural context at least in the West is significant for understanding why some sections of the media would promote feminism as the bag lady of the ’80s, the loathly lady who is unable to transform herself into a desirable post-feminist babe: a girl with attitude, looks, money, and power. This is of course a glib take on post-feminism, which conceals the more damaging effects of what some feminists see as a media-driven ideology (Faludi, 1992). In her criticism of post-feminism, Germaine Greer (1999) gives a sharp lefthander to this market-driven phenomenon, accusing it of being, among many things, about ‘ostentatious sluttishness and disorderly behaviour’ (p. 5) promoting a luxury in which only certain privileged women and girls of the affluent Western world can indulge. While it is easy to set up the media as a straw-doll target by generalising media coverage and analysis as presenting a single viewpoint, Brooks, nevertheless, makes a valid point in claiming that ‘the role of the media is clearly a powerful one in framing the generally negative and “popular” understanding of “postfeminism”’ (1997, p. 3). Brooks goes on to say that such framing of post-feminism is useful to see how feminism ‘becomes rewritten, depoliticised and incorporated into media accounts of contemporary culture’ (p. 4). Popular post-feminism can be usefully studied in terms of how it differs from academic accounts, particularly those informed by poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Academic accounts of post-feminism are far from unified, but they present a shift in thinking about equality to issues about difference. Brooks sees this political and conceptual shift as part of post-feminism’s ‘critical engagement with earlier feminist political and theoretical concepts and strategies as a result of its engagement with other social movements for change’ (p. 4). For many feminist scholars post-feminism is aligned with the goals of Third Wave Feminism in their dual concerns for addressing the needs and demands of marginalised, diasporic, and colonised cultures which


were often absent from the hegemonic forms of feminism frequently attributed to Second Wave Feminism. Despite the shared goals of a more inclusive feminism, the tension between ‘Third Wave Feminism’ and ‘Postfeminism’ centres on how the latter is translated by different sections of popular culture and academe. Third World Feminists cast their political net to encompass women of colour and other marginalised women, which can be seen as going beyond the populist writings of high-profile, post-feminist writers such as Naomi Wolf. As Gamble notes: ‘In tracing its origins back to the activism of the US immigrant community, it roots itself in a process of social and political endeavour that doesn’t begin and end with the white middle classes, the point at which Wolf’s analysis founders’ (2001, p. 44). While Third Wave Feminism makes a conscious attempt to attend to the politics of difference, it is difficult for any movement to offer solutions to the persistent and changing conditions and dilemmas associated with gender and sexuality. There are also contestations surrounding the term ‘Third Wave Feminism’ and, as Hammer and Kellner note, this comes from how the term is used ‘to describe a number of diverse feminist and anti-feminist theories and practices’ (2007, p. ix). One such practice occurs over cultural production and how texts activate a range of emotions – desire, pleasure, and anger – to raise awareness of struggles over freedom and justice. One area of cultural production is television soaps and other romance series, which Merri Lisa Johnson examines in Third Wave Feminism and Television (2007). For Johnson, the dilemma many young women (and possibly some young men) face arises from what she sees as the inevitable tension between feminist positions and the guilty pleasures that come with watching these programmes: Those ‘lures and pleasures’ recall an unresolved debate in feminism over the politics of pleasure: the problem of bad pleasures lurking and lulling women into false consciousness, complicity with patriarchy, masochistic submission. (Johnson, 2007, p. 5) We have reached a point of return to the beginning of this chapter. The riddle, it seems, is not so much what women desire, but as I foreshadowed, what gender desires. There is also the question about what constitutes good or bad pleasure in a post-feminist age. The two – desire and pleasure – are like conjoined twins, inseparable and codependent. The matter of desire and pleasure was raised in the previous chapter and is the basis for engagement between readers/spectators and texts.


Texts such as romances offer many readers and viewers pleasures, and if we desire these pleasures we willingly engage in the discursive-aesthetic construction of subjectivity that these texts temporarily offer (Misson & Morgan, 2006, p. 72). However, as Johnson notes above, there is a feminist struggle over the ‘politics of pleasure’. Popular romances, such as those marketed for teenagers under dubious labels such as ‘chick lit’ or ‘lad lit’ exemplify this struggle of good and bad pleasure. These texts wear their popular post-feminist hearts on their sleeves (literally in the case of the novels) with their promotion of the ‘Everygirl’ and her singleminded ‘quest for coupledom’ (Pearce, 2007, p. 183). Lynn Pearce draws a comparison between ‘chick-lit’ and ‘lad-lit’, the latter exemplified by popular YA writers such as Nick Hornby, Marcus Zuzak, Melvin Burgess, and Matt Zurbo. Pearce’s argument is that the male characters in lad-lit need romantic love and their overtly misogynistic behaviour is a result of a conflicted masculinity, especially with regard to the pressures of heterosexual sex. These romances give expression to the dilemmas of growing up in a society where there is a great degree of uncertainty and vulnerability about gender. Butler (2004, p. 28) regards ‘the new gender politics’ as having impacted on feminist, lesbian, gay, and masculinist frameworks. But how are these politics played out in texts produced for young people in what is described as a post-feminist age? Unlike the utopian outcomes of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnall and Shrek and Princess Fiona, the following discussion focuses on trouble in paradise. For every utopia, a necessary dystopia awaits: a lesson that goes back to the Bible. Eve’s conversation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden figures as part of the ongoing dilemma between femininity and patriarchy. As Eve wrestles with the desire for the forbidden, she must make a choice which requires a course of action, the performative consequences of her choice become her undoing. But outside the Biblical world, the consequences need not be so catastrophic. As Butler (2004) contends, becoming undone can result in both positive and negative consequences. With this ambivalence in mind we now consider how the desire/pleasure debate opens up a contested space for agency, prohibition, productive pleasures, punishment, and reward in a range of romance narratives written for young adults.

A fine romance?: You Know You Love Me In post-feminist, postmodern times, romance fiction has hardly waned. On the contrary, romantic fiction is positively waxing, opening out for readers of all ages an imaginary space for pleasure and desire.


Elam suggests that ‘romance writes a reality that is invested by desire’ (Elam, 1992, p. 156, italics in original). This textual investment in desire (re)enacts experience that is both real and imagined, and it is this ‘experience’ of romance as it is spoken, written, and read by the desiring subject that offers intense pleasure. Yet, despite this intensity of pleasure, romantic love is a discourse defined by misunderstanding, obstacles, trauma, and miscommunication (Pearce, 2004, p. 530). The course of true love, so we are told, does not run smoothly, and yet we are compelled to repeat the past, to forgive and forget because we are also told that love will conquer all. How do we explain our compulsion to return to a genre that seems so masochistic? One explanation is that in reading about the difficulties others experience we will feel less alone in our own yearnings, desires, and romantic misadventures. Another more optimistic explanation is that reading these novels might give us hope or an expectation that the future holds promise and our dreams will come true. This second view of a utopian possibility is one that Ernst Bloch (1986, p. 86) considers as part of the function of daydreams. For Bloch, daydreams are not simply idle time wasters, but opportunities that offer inspiration, turning ‘that which does not yet exist’ into a possibility. In this section I consider one of the Gossip Girl romance novels as being emblematic of the contradictory pleasures and desires of both the popular (YA) romance genre and post-feminism with respect to new gender relations, institutions, and orthodoxies (such as heterosexual marriage and courtships). In trying to determine these contradictions we need to ask ourselves: How do we read Gossip Girl? Is it a repressive, conservative form of popular fiction that offers young female readers limited and shallow subject positions? Is it a postmodern romance that employs irony to cast light on existing cultural orthodoxies about gender, sexuality, youth, and Western decadence? Both are possible readings. The Gossip Girl (GG) series is typical of many post-feminist ‘femalecentred’ genres, in that it attempts a ‘representational verisimilitude’ (Tasker & Negra, 2005, p. 107) that locates the texts as part of the cultural milieu of a post-feminist world (albeit a privileged, white, New York elite). It also brashly promotes itself as a post-feminist commodity packaged for the teen market. This teen demographic (15–17-year olds) has been shaped by the processes of neoliberalism with its attention to individualism and consumerism. This investment in the self (within Western capitalism, at least) is firmly based on the notion of personal ‘entitlement’ (Pearce, 2007, p. 168). Consequently, the targeted (ideal) readers of the series have come to expect that as young women they


are entitled to have it all – money, mobility, education, and particularly sexual freedom. The back cover of You Know You Love Me carries an endorsement by Publishers Weekly of the particular discursive-aesthetic position that the text offers – ‘A nasty guilty pleasure’. Physical attractiveness, class, and privilege are clearly the desired and defining elements of the series. The front covers of the GG series add to the guilty pleasures by offering voyeuristic glimpses of the photographed attractive female bodies. By never showing the photographed females in full view, the photographs are complicit with the text’s fetishising strategy of the female body revealing only the legs, lips, upper body, and long, glossy hair of the models. Accompanying the body parts are the designer accoutrements – handbags, tops, dresses, lipstick, perfume. The official website for the series (www.gossipgirl.co.uk) includes an endorsement of the series by The Sunday Telegraph: ‘Praise for Gossip Girls: A Far Superior Example of the Genre (Teen Fiction)’. It also affirms the author’s credentials by stating that ‘Cecily von Zeigesar herself attended one of the smart private schools in Manhattan, New York, and many of the tales told in Gossip Girl ring with great authenticity as a result’. Another implicit marketing feature of GG texts is that they sell female agency as another available commodity – there for the taking. Female agency in You Know You Love Me operates out of feeling of lack and a searching for something that will fill the void. Blair’s quest is to lose her virginity to Nate is an example of the working of a Lacanian desire within the text. Rather than see sex with Nate as a way of enacting on her sexuality, she sees it as having the same significance and urgency as any other item on her must-have/must-do shopping list. Throughout the narrative, Blair articulates a heterosexual longing for a romantic/sexual relationship with Nate. Blair reinscribes intercourse as part of a familiar romance movie that she wishes her life to follow. Blair’s reference points reflect the intertextuality of romantic love, with its origins in the stories and films that encircle our lives from the past and in the present. These past romantic narratives provide Blair with a template for how romance is supposed to work (Breakfast at Tiffany's is a favourite). As she explains, in these movies the ‘scenes were always romantic and tasteful, with lots of long, heartfelt kisses, great outfits, and cool hairdos’ (Ziegesar, 1993, pp. 24–5). The Hollywood romance films fill Blair with a yearning for an idealised past when gender and sexuality were less fluid, and the romantic fantasies of ‘true love’ and ‘love at first sight’ were given verisimilitude. This attention to working at romance highlights Giddens’s (1991) notion of ‘the project of the self’ whereby individuals in post-capitalism take on responsibility to


themselves and others by working with a ‘program of reflexive resources’: therapy, self-help manuals, makeover television programs (p. 33). This new investment in the self demands a good return; if good sex or romantic love is the expected return, then that is the ‘entitlement’ that one can come to expect to ensure that love’s labours are not lost. Despite the promise of fruitful labours, and for all Blair’s agential attempts at seduction, love is indeed lost. As the leading lady, Blair plans to become the seductress, who will lure Nate into having sex with her. However, in performing as the agential seductress she oddly positions herself as the (passive) desired object of Nate’s fantasy. She decides to wear a pair of Manolo Blanhnik shoes her gay father gives her as an early birthday present: Not only were they unbelievably cool, but they were exactly what she was going to wear later that night when she and Nate had sex. Those and nothing else. Thanks, Daddy! (p. 11) The Freudian inference is given a not-so-subtle nudge when Blair’s father passes the wrapped gift to his daughter and says, ‘For my little shoe fetishista’ (p. 10). It is tempting to read this incident in terms of possible psychoanalytic references to the incest taboo and the fetish substitute, but to do so would attribute too much to its passing reference to the fetish – a word which has made its way from psychoanalysis to common parlance. However, we could indulge in a psychoanalytic moment by suggesting that Blair’s naming of ‘Daddy’ invokes the phallus, which in Lacanian terms signifies power and control. Given the status of Blair’s father as the source of her economic and symbolic capital, this observation is not entirely unsupportable. Femininity is always in an ambiguous relationship to the phallus as a paternal signifier and the primary moment of desire. Rowley and Grosz (1990) offer a Lacanian interpretation of how desire works with respect to women by arguing that a woman attempts to compensate for this lack, ‘by making the whole of her body into the erotic object of men’s desire’ (1990, p. 187). When Blair finally gets Nate in her bedroom, she slips into her bathroom and prepares ‘the whole of her body into the erotic object’ of Nate’s desire: Blair finished strapping on the Manolos and spritzed herself with perfume. She closed her eyes and counted to three. One, two, three. In those three seconds she played a short film in her head, imagining


the incredible night she and Nate were about to have. They were childhood lovers, destined to be together, giving themselves wholly to one another. She opened her eyes and ran the brush through her hair one more time, checking out her reflection in the mirror. She looked confident and ready. She looked like someone who always got what she wanted. She was the girl who was going to get into Yale and marry the boy. If only her nostrils weren’t quite so big or her breasts so small, but whatever. She pushed open the bathroom door. (p. 24) In this excerpt, the fetishising of the female form, combined with Blair’s self-critical bodily assessment (big nostrils, small breasts) undermines any threat to the phallic order. Furthermore, Blair does not experience a feminine jouissance of blissful, sexually-active flesh, as she is disappointed by the clumsy foreplay with Nate. It is awkward and doesn’t look as good as it does in the movies, or presumably feel as nice (p. 25). However, Blair’s plan to have sex with Nate comes unstuck, and by the end of the novel she is still a virgin, and Nate is no longer interested in her (he has taken up with Jenny). In this respect, the narrative disrupts the ‘ideal’ romance, with its resolute focus on a developing romance between two would-be lovers, and female agency is misdirected and ultimately denied. There is no space in You Know You Love Me to consider sex and gender other than in a one-to-one correspondence within a heterosexual frame. This is a story of heterosexual desire, and male–female coupling is the name of the game. The only character to emerge as being a possible disruption to the gender binary is Vanessa with her butch appearance – shaved head, Doc Martens, and second-hand clothes. The narrator assures us that ‘Vanessa was different’ (p. 60). However, by the end of the novel she too is transformed from a butch-looking woman who desires Dan, to a butch-femme who desires Dan – and she gets her man! When Dan sees Vanessa looking ‘fabulous’ dressed in her black, cat dress, painted dark red lips, pale skin, ‘head shaved like an army dude’s’ (p. 217), he is attracted to her newly created image. The transformation from butch to femme fatale succeeds in luring the male, and her mix of sexy femininity and shaved head demands to be looked at and invites a reciprocal to-be-looked-at pleasure (Mulvey, 1975). As in the Hollywood film noir genre, this femme fatale also finds love with the object of her desire when she transforms from sexy to sweet. To ensure that the reader remains within the phallocentric frame, Serena confirms the benefits of sweet femininity for falling in love: ‘her


face looked softer and sweeter than Serena had ever seen it. That was because Vanessa was looking at Dan and Dan was looking back at her and they were … in love!’ (p. 219). This moment articulates the point that romance is essentially about couples or a triangulated relationship of desire among competing lovers (Serena, Nate, and Jenny). According to Butler, sexuality is a way of being that is ‘dependent on a world of others, vulnerable to need, violence, betrayal, compulsion, fantasy; we project desire, and we have it projected onto us’ (2004, p. 33). You Know You Love Me is essentially about this world of dependence, and the subject’s desire for recognition. Butler (2005) argues that in our attempts to be recognised and understood we are compelled to give an account of ourselves. We tell stories about ourselves to an other, even if the other ‘remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified’ (Butler, 2005, p. 36). However, as Butler explains, in giving an account of ourselves we are always interrupted, as one’s story is never grounded in the self alone, but belongs to a sociality that exceeds the self. One way that You Know You Love Me attempts this sociality of recognition is through narratorial interruptions. ‘Gossip Girl’ is an intrusive narrator who may or may not be the omniscient narrator who has complete knowledge of the characters and the time and space of the narrative. Gossip Girl and other unknown correspondents comment on the characters, exposing them by revealing observations and ‘knowledge’ (albeit gossip) that are outside of the main narrative frame. The frame-breaking interruptions, which appear in the form of a chat room (or blog) between ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘real readers’ of the book are a metafictive strategy. However, the strategy is more than metafiction as the blog within the novel and on the GG website offer a paradoxical ‘reality’: both frame the told story as story while endowing the gossiped stories with an everyday realism familiar to the world of the readers (and bloggers). These titbits or narrative fragments comment on crisis points reached in the lives of the characters and exchange gossip under ‘Sightings’, Q and A emails, and general headings whereby cheatings, hook-ups, and aberrant behaviours (such as Blair’s shoplifting) are reported and added to the gossip mix. However, as the following example illustrates, these metacommentaries also add a conservative and an anti-feminist perspective on the ‘proper’ path romantic relationships should follow: hey people! THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR This time of year is usually dull, with nothing much happening until the holiday party season. But B’s mother has given us all something


to talk about. I mean, how long have she and her boyfriend known each other, anyway? Like two or three months? If I were going to spend the rest of my life with someone, or even a weekend, I’d like to know them better than that. (Ziegesar, 1993, p. 43) The chatroom simulates a blog as it gives a convergence of timely information from different perspectives. Consequently, the ‘world of others’ that Butler mentions extends in this novel to a mimetic extra-textual world. Vulnerability looms large in the text and resembles the cut and thrust of youth culture whereby acceptance and rejection are ever-present concerns and possibilities. This corresponds to Butler’s point above that as sexual beings we are vulnerable to need. Dan, the sensitive guy, writes love poems, signs off his Instant Messages with ‘Amor omnia vincit! Love conquers all’ (p. 95), and cries into his double scotch on the rocks when he feels rejected by the love of his life, Serena. His desire for Serena is continually frustrated, but by the close of the novel these frustrations can be understood as necessary for ensuring that Dan ends up with his one true love – Vanessa. The strategies of displacement and denial that construct Dan’s character regulate what is an impossible desire – to win the heart of Serena van der Woodsten so that he can reach a state of ease by moving from the disease of lovesickness. Vanessa and Dan share a similar background – both have parents who are non-conventional and not rich which sets them apart from the other characters’ parents. Thus, when Dan and Vanessa ‘recognise’ each as the object of their love interest their eventual falling in love ensures the class status quo, which runs counter to the blossoming romance between Jenny (Dan’s sister) and Nate. Jenny is in ninth grade and is therefore a few years younger than the college-bound others, a fact which is repeated several times to remind readers of her vulnerable and corruptible status. Even Jenny is concerned about her age of innocence so decides to call herself ‘Jennifer’ to appear older and more sophisticated. When Nate takes her to his bedroom when his home is empty, readers are left to wonder if Nate will have his way with the innocent Jenny. However, the narrative shifts from its focus on her age to her body. Readers are positioned to see Jenny as the object of the male gaze, with Nate only interested in her because of the size of her breasts and the kind of kudos that could win him in the eyes of his mates: ‘Nate noticed Jenny’s chest. Man, was it ever huge. He couldn’t let her get away, not without Jeremy and the other guys getting a chance to check her out’ (p. 70). With the


medicalising of breasts to ‘chest’ and describing it as ‘huge’ one could easily substitute a masculine name for Jenny and the description would convey a sense of awe and envy on the part of the ogling Nate. A queer readerly moment perhaps? My focus on You Know You Love Me as a representative text from the Gossip Girl series serves to raise dilemmas that continue to snap at the heels of the popular romance genre. One of the ongoing dilemmas concerns ‘good’ romance/‘bad’ romance and the kinds of corresponding desires and pleasures that they offer readers. It is an easy argument perhaps to categorise a romance according to its perceived worth. But are we talking about literary or political worth? Or do we mean its value for readers, escapist or otherwise? Elam (1992) notes that there is wide disagreement over the political valency of the popular romance genre. Rosalind Coward (1985) argued that popular romances such as Harlequin simply reinforce for women the submissive roles prescribed by patriarchy. Furthermore, she claims that the only power the female characters gain is ‘familial, and regressive’ (p. 106). While popular romances such as Harlequin and Mills & Boon have changed in the past 20 years since Coward’s observation, the romantic love paradigm they now endorse dispenses with the hero and puts the woman’s ‘satisfaction/self-actualisation’ (Pearce, 2007, p. 182) at its core, but the change is a cosmetic one. As Pearce comments, what these romances promote is the ‘glamour/kudos’ of lifestyles that come with career choices, designer wardrobes, active sexuality, ‘rather than any meaningful observation on women’s liberation’ (p. 182). Following a similar line of argument, Naomi Wolf (2006) writing for The New York Times about Gossip Girl, A List and Clique series claims they represent a new kind of young adult fiction, and feature a different kind of heroine, one who is empowered. But for Wolf these empowered ‘heroines’ (in the Clique series) are empowered to hire party planners, or draw up a petition calling for the cafeteria ladies serving their lunches to get manicures. What’s more their empowerment equals a perceived entitlement to humiliate the ‘sluts’ in their classes. The Gossip Girl counterparts find a similar kind of ‘empowerment’ through their unrestricted use of credit cards, which their parents pay for. However, Wolf compares these series with other YA romance novels (novels by Judy Blume for example), which she sees as having transformative potential. It seems that the issues about agency or empowerment are somewhat arbitrary as my discussion of You Know You Love Me suggests. One of the problems with popular romance literature is that the genre is trying to accommodate both a ‘sex in the city’ style excitement and the fulfilment of a more traditional love story. While YA readers might want to


read about more sexually active female characters, the genre continues to offer a conservative ideology with respect to coupledom, sexuality, and the tensions and contradictions of living in a post-feminist age. Consequently, GG may be seen as offering a safe compromise – neither too racy nor too conservative, but exposing some of the contestations that exist for young people today with respect to norms of gender and sexuality. This kind of reading outcome depends on readers recognising or attributing irony to the text. Thus, the dilemma of romance seems to be about how gender occupies its spaces and how cultural meaning is constructed, understood, and given value within those spaces. This attention to being in the world and the experience of space (setting, environment, geography) become apparent in the following texts that attempt to destabilise gender norms and dismantle the divide between private and public space upon which a metanarrative of liberated desire and subjective identity are built.

Stepping out (without my Baby) In this section, I explore the popular mainstream film Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and the YA novel Whistle Me Home by Barbara Wersba (1997); both texts give expression to the female protagonists’ experiences of being in the world, a world variously shaped by the complex interactions of discourses of family, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Whistle Me Home has characteristics of a romance story with its themes of love lost, mourning, and obsession. Bend It Like Beckham, too, shares some of the motifs and patterns of romance narrative. These texts, like others in this chapter, highlight the view that ‘romance’ is more a mixed mode than a genre (Saunders, 2004, p. 3). Both texts raise pertinent social comment about gender, race, and sexuality. Their effects may create a social or political awareness as well as allow an engagement with some of the universals of human experience – kinship, love, and loss. In Bend It Like Beckham (2002) the conflicting pulls of Eastern tradition and Western post-feminism produce dual discourses of the spiritual and the material, the home and the world, and the contestations that occur with the privileging of one part of the binary over the other. This opposition between world and home, inner and outer spaces is a point made by Partha Chatterjee (1989, p. 239) who comments, with respect to nineteenth-century Indian nationalist discourse, that ‘world’ corresponds to the West and material culture, and ‘home’ relates to the


East with its ties to spiritual culture and identity. The inner space of the home in traditional romance narratives has been the domain of the feminine, while the outer space of the world has been the domain of the masculine. Bend It Like Beckham offers a paradoxical perspective on these spatial domains. On the one hand, the central female protagonist/ heroine, Jess, breaks away from the home, eventually travelling abroad to pursue her dream of playing soccer for England; on the other hand, the home remains, at least for her mother (and possibly her older sister after her wedding), a space that continues to be gendered feminine. In this respect, the film is as much about ‘Indian’ femininities as it is about post-feminist subjectivity and agency. The discursive dilemmas over what constitutes proper and improper Indian femininity are played out in this film via a complex intermixing of ethnic caricature, humour, and post-feminist gestures with respect to the key female characters and their driving motivations to break away from traditional gender norms. A central contestation is between mothers and daughters; another is within the ‘sisterhood’ of the young female characters. Underlying both forms of contestation is heterosexual desire and female sexuality. However, these matters of feminine rupture occur within the main narrative frame, which is about teenage girls (Jess and Jules) overcoming obstacles from their respective families to play soccer. Jess’s Sikh family, and particularly her mother, consider the sport to be disrespectful and inappropriate to the proper conduct of Indian femininity, while Jules’s mother, a hyperfeminised caricature (and the opposite of Jess’s mother’s conservative femininity) is unable to understand why girls would want to play this masculine sport and wear such unflattering clothes. She also cannot understand that affectionate female friendship does not necessarily translate into a sexual relationship. Consequently, her fears that her daughter is a lesbian (why else would she choose to wear unflattering trackpants?) need to be allayed before she can support her daughter’s desire to play soccer. Both mothers try to distract their daughters from what they see as aberrant behaviour (playing soccer) by instructing them in the ways of ‘proper’ femininity: Jess’s mother insists that she learn to cook a full Indian meal, and Jules’s mother unsubtly attempts to transform Jules’s flat chest with an inflatable bra as a guaranteed means for securing the male gaze and a potential boyfriend, although she insists that the outcome is all about how it feels, not how it looks. While the comic element to these incidents invites the audience to laugh at these older women and their conflicting notions of femininity, women are further put in their place when the girls’ fathers ultimately decide to make a


stand against their wives by supporting their daughters’ sporting ambitions. This intervention can be seen as patriarchy to the rescue without which post-feminism will become another lost cause. Despite its humorous take on gender and its ‘girl power’ theme, one of the striking features of Bend It Like Beckham is the antagonisms between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which draw on discourses of gender, sexuality, and race. The film’s attempt to present a light-hearted approach to racial discrimination and gender and sexual politics is carried out via cultural stereotypes. The influx of Bollywood films to mainstream cinemas in the West in recent years has included romantic comedies that often employ caricature and humour based on self-mockery of Indian accent, gestures, music, dance, and of course romantic love.1 These films have been popular with mainstream Western audiences and have undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of these racial stereotypes. What these stereotypes produce for dominant cultural discourses is the fiction of a coherent, monolithic ethnic community with common interests and desires. The writer/producer of this film is Gurinder Chadha. As an Indian woman one might consider her as providing an authentic, insider account of the complexity for women and girls living in dual cultures. Given this kind of Western assumption about the film’s authenticity complicates the ‘them’ and ‘us’ of the viewing audience, particularly since there is no singular ‘audience’, but many comprising different ethnicities, citizenships, genders, and so on. The narrative frame further complicates ‘them’ and ‘us’ in a number of ways that extend both within and outside the constructed Indian/Anglo communities. The different configurations of ‘them’ and ‘us’ demonstrate how both the Indian and the Anglo communities are internally fractured along gender and generational lines. However, there is also a naïvety with respect to sexuality that is demarcated along generational lines in the represented communities. Except for Jess, the other young Indian women (including Jess’s sister Pinky) are sexually aware and active. But the older women appear innocent in the ways of sex, despite their obvious sexual experiences. In a related way, Jules’s mother, Paula, is similarly constructed as innocent yet aware of her sexuality. Paula’s immersion in heterosexual desire limits her understanding of lesbian desire. The point of convergence between these innocent/aware discourses is evident in the scene when Paula storms Jess’s sister’s wedding. In this scene, Jess is dressed like the other Indian women in a traditional sari but is wearing a pair of Paula’s shoes (which Jules gave her because she did not have a decent pair of her own). When Paula sees her shoes


on Jess’s feet she screams: ‘Get your lesbian feet out of my shoes!’ The assembled wedding crowd are puzzled by the outburst and the following exchange among some of the older Indian women defuses the attack on non-normative sexuality through its humorous linguistic slippage: ‘Lesbian? Her birthday’s in March.’ ‘I thought she was a Pisces.’ ‘She no Lebanese. She Punjabi!’ In light of the gendered, racialised, and sexualised logic of ‘them’ and ‘us’ it is not surprising that there was conservative opposition to Jess’s father joining the local cricket club when he first arrived in Britain. However, this insularity/assimilation issue is also played out in the Indian community, especially with respect to inter-racial romantic relationships. Both forms of exclusion are based on anxieties over issues of belonging and power. However, the us/them divide within and outside the Indian/Anglo communities is transgressed by Jess’s family’s increased status and ownership of private property (their home is a showpiece and testament to the father’s success as the breadwinner and a participant in Britain’s workforce.) A further transgression occurs in the representation of young Indian women’s sexuality. Jess represents the stereotypical Indian (unmarried) woman whose sexuality is strictly controlled by her family; ironically, Jess has little interest in sex or boys (until her coach Joe shows interest). However, her parents remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that her sister Pinky enjoys a sexual freedom with her boyfriend orchestrated through deceit and subterfuge. Other young women (Bubbly, Monica, Taz) are constructed as ‘bad girls’ (Jess at one stage call them ‘slags’): they dress provocatively and enjoy their sexuality in ways that violate traditional notions of chaste (Indian) womanhood and religious precepts. However, these girls are also constructed as the ugly step-sisters who sneer, snarl, and give disapproving looks to Jess and Jules. They might be bad girls having fun, but the audience is clearly positioned to align with the virginal, good girls − Jess and Jules − and to see these other characters in one-dimensional terms. The conservative Indian attitudes towards sexuality and young people are enforced through policing and regulatory actions by parents and other members of the community who are always ready to report back to the family any ‘suspicious’ behaviour they witness or hear about Jess and Pinky. Despite this conservatism and control, Pinky’s wedding becomes a space of ribald sexuality, singing, and dancing: a man


joyfully gropes an older woman on the dance floor, while a young woman makes out with a boy in the toilets. The wedding becomes a carnivalesque space where order and authority are momentarily displaced. The grandmother, a symbol of such order and familial authority, dances and becomes the object of sexual play, which runs counter to her desexualised idealisation.2 The different discourses in the film with respect to the playing out of transgressions and binaries within spaces defined by cultural and gender norms, conventions and social structures expose the constraints that operate on individuals which prohibits their full participation in the society in which they live. The film offers viewers situations and narrative actions that draw their attention to particular dilemmas and problems that the characters face. A repeated feature that threads throughout the film is that of gender (and racial) equality. We are presented with the situations whereby characters’ agency and subjectivity are delimited by the spaces they inhabit, and to overcome these obstacles requires transformation. To achieve equality and thereby be allowed to play soccer and seek a sports scholarship at an American university, Jess needs to transform from her dependent Indian female identity located in the home to an independent, post-feminist traveller of the world. However, to achieve this transformation, and so remake her identity and achieve a subjectivity and agency, she decides to leave romance behind, abandoning the conventional domestic narrative that her family has always dreamed for her. By choosing success as a soccer player, Jess breaks away from the romance tradition and, in particular, the ethnic woman’s story of containment, which is Jess’s mother’s story. In her comment on masculine immigration fictions, Friedman (2005, p. 177) notes that ‘women characters often disappear behind the narrative of the man’s ultimate success’. However, racial equality is an equally dominant theme in this film. The pairing of Jess and Jules offers viewers a situation of cross-cultural female friendship. But the most explicit example is in the final scene when Jess’s father and her Irish coach/ boyfriend, Joe, play in a friendly cricket match on a common. As Ashby suggests, the imagery of this scene is: ... redolent with traditional notions of Englishness; that the players are a once-excluded Sikh and an Irish boy assert a version of contemporary Britain as a modernized – though evocatively nostalgic – space of inclusion and equality where the pain of the past has been worked through and healed. (Ashby, 2005, pp. 130–31)


While post-feminism provides a popular frame for promoting girl power and equality in Bend It Like Beckham, female sexuality is given ambiguous treatment. Initially, Jess is constructed as an androgynous young woman who epitomises energetic activism – she is interested in training and playing hard and is not taken in by the girlie interests of the other girls who enjoy dressing up, make-up, and flirting. The valorisation of the boyish girl is in some sense a male reaction to the fear of female sexuality, thereby reducing both its potentially disruptive power over men and its challenge to maternal authority. When romance blossoms between Jess and Joe it is because she transforms from androgynous boy/girl to sexy female at a night out while they are away on a soccer trip. Her transformation into a glamorous and sexually attractive young woman heightens a familiar romantic triad – Jess, Joe, Jules. But Jess’s complete dedication to an uncompromising work-ethic and goal to succeed provides a strong bond between Jess and the other two. Jess’s transformation into sexualised young woman reinstates female sexuality within a heterosexual frame while defusing any potential lesbian sexuality between Jess and Jules.3 When Paula and Jules argue after the incident at the wedding, Jules tells her that she is not a lesbian. The following dialogue captures the relief and deflection of any accusation that Paula is a bigot: JULES: PAULA:

‘Being a lesbian is not that big a deal.’ ‘No, no … I’ve got nothing against them. I was cheering for Martina Navratilova as much as the next person’.

When a group of male friends go with Tony (Jess’s sympathetic gay friend) to watch the female soccer team play, the boys fail to see the girls other than in sexual terms, while Tony is positioned outside this masculinist discourse: ‘They don’t all look like lezzies, do they?’ ‘Check out the boobs on the captain!’ ‘Jeez, man, they must get in the way!’ ‘She’s lucky she ain’t knocked herself out with them!’ [Tony] ‘Why can’t you lot just see them as footballers?’ In the closing scenes, Jess, Joe, Jules and their families meet at the airport and past anxieties and concerns are erased as they say farewell to the girls as they embark on their trip to the States. At this point of reconciliation, the girls spot David Beckham and his wife Victoria


walking through the airport. This image of Becks-in-the-flesh reinforces romance’s claim that dreams come true. Jess has had a poster of Beckham in her bedroom, an image which she reveres as much as her mother’s devotion to the holy man painting in the family’s living room. Ashby sees this farewell scene as demonstrating a paradigmatic element of post-feminism, namely, equality and choice. Bend It Like Beckham then offers a post-feminist narrative for girls demonstrating that success will come their way if they make the right choice. And with a little help from a wish-fulfilment fantasy (and the spiritual guidance of Beckham) girls can succeed in traditional male domains such as soccer. Bend It Like Beckham does not so much interrogate racial, gender, and sexual difference as offer a view of the young, post-feminist, Indian woman as an unthreatening figure. According to Ashby, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘New Britain’ resonates in the film with its emphasis on a new democratic era with opportunities for women: music to the ears of post-feminists. The overall note of celebration, multicultural harmony and gender equality means that through its narrative ambivalences and framing within the romantic comedy genre, contemporary ideologies are not subjected to scrutiny. In contrast to Bend It Like Beckham’s Edenic closure of harmony, Whistle Me Home avoids a utopian outcome by exploring the effects of unfulfilled desire. This novel employs the familiar plot device of the love triangle, but with a difference. While it is usual in a teen romance for the female protagonist to ‘decide between two boys who are interested in her’ (Litton, 1994, p. 20), in this text it is the gay character TJ who is caught between his platonic love for Noli, his former girlfriend and ‘soul mate’ (p. 25), and the sexual relationship and friendship with his new (male) lover, Walker. Noli is captivated by TJ and initially fails to recognise him as a gay subject. The layers to TJ’s personhood are only peeled away in parts, leaving spaces for readers to develop their own hypotheses long before Noli comes to a realisation about his sexuality. For instance, his love of Gerard Manley Hopkins is made clear early in the novel and serves as a subtle clue to his possible sexuality.4 As their relationship develops, TJ’s reluctance to give nothing more than a chaste kiss when Noli wants full sex becomes the final point of realisation for Noli that TJ is gay. The story is focalised from Noli’s point of view and traces, in part, a retrospective account of how she comes to terms with this doomed romance and TJ’s sexuality. It is also significantly about Noli’s struggle to achieve a feminine subjectivity. Desire then is mobilised in this text in a number of ways but is principally imbricated in the practical


and ontological quandaries about gender and sexuality that the narrative foregrounds. Noli occupies a paradoxical position in the text: she is positioned on the margins – hiding, watching at a distance; she is also positioned in the centre – she is the focalising character and as such we come to know about her thoughts and gain knowledge of her actions and motivations. Noli is further marginalised in terms of her aberrant behaviour and appearance. Noli resists femininity, refusing to conform to its norms of behaviour and dress. She cuts her own hair, shoplifts, fights with her mother, drinks vodka, smokes marijuana, and having burnt all her dresses and bras she wears only jeans, hiking boots and a baseball cap. Despite these ‘acts of disobedience’ (Butler, 1993, p. 79), Noli fails to derive agency. Rather, she is a melancholy figure who is full of self-loathing. It is only when TJ comes into her life and tells her he loves her that she transforms and becomes the desiring subject of romance: Her entire world has been altered since TJ said “I love you.” She holds these words in her mind and she repeats them to herself at night, before falling asleep, trying to imitate TJ’s voice as he said them. I love you are the three purest words in the English language, Noli thinks. They are like diamonds. (p. 33) The transformation that Noli desires is incomplete and obstructed by TJ who insists that Noli dresses in the same way as himself. This controlling gesture, to have her reflected back to him as his mirror image, is repeated and with more success when TJ and Walker become a couple and dress alike. While Noli can be seen as unsettling the system of representation with her masculine style and voyeuristic behaviour, the irony is that TJ contributes to this process of Noli’s undifferentiation, denying the visual any ‘claim to feminine specificity’ (Langbauer, 1990, p. 195). These performances of gender also reduce the distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and in so doing draws our attention to the constructedness of gender and sexuality. Noli’s dressing like a boy has an imitative quality that is similar to TJ’s performance/passing as her heterosexual boyfriend. When her romance with TJ is over, Noli reverts to old ways, and cannot resist the compulsion to spy on TJ and his new lover. As readers we are positioned to see this irrational and compulsive behaviour as evidence of Noli’s further descent into self-destruction. She returns to


her melancholic state, unable and unwilling to accept what she has lost. We could also see Noli’s spying in another way. Rather than being the ‘to-be-looked-at’ female, Noli reclaims the gaze by taking on the position of voyeur for herself, looking at TJ and Walker and imagining them having sex: She is standing across the street, shielded by a big oak tree, and she knows they [TJ and Walker] cannot see her … And she knows that Walker and TJ are lovers … She knows they have been naked together, and given sex to each other, and fallen asleep afterwards like tired children. And what is she now but a kind of voyeur – an outsider destined to watch and dream. (p. 84) In reversing the situation whereby TJ is the sex object, the object of female and male desire, Noli is the bearer of the gaze. In her discussion of sight and the use of metaphors of sight in writing about romance, Laurie Langbauer (1990, p. 188) notes how what we believe to be reality is informed by our understanding of what the visual means, ‘especially by the assumption that the observation of empirical data somehow offers access to universal truth and natural law’. Whistle Me Home privileges sight particularly as it is used to shape desire. The opening words of the novel give us a description of TJ, focalised through Noli’s point of view. Her words offer an observable ‘truth’ about his physical attractiveness. We see what the omniscient narrator tells us Noli sees: TJ Baker is coming down the street towards her, wearing ragged blue jeans, boots, and a white T-shirt – and his face is the face of an angel in a painting Noli saw once in a museum. It might have been the Metropolitan. TJ has a tan, from surfing all summer off the beach at Bridgehampton, and his curly brown hair is long – almost to his shoulders. He looks so good that Noli begins to cry. (p. 3) Later, when TJ takes up with Walker, the all-seeing narrator captures the physical attractiveness of the two boys by describing them as being ‘like Greek gods’ (p. 84). As spectators, we are interpolated, drawn in to the unfolding events and ultimately placed into a position of acknowledging the dilemma that Noli faces: to continue loving TJ or to be free of him.


Butler sees loss and melancholia as essential for the ego and as presenting possibility for agency (1997b, p. 171). Butler’s point is that recognising one’s melancholia is a move towards accepting one’s Otherness. In a letter Noli writes to her mother she acknowledges this acceptance of her Otherness: I know you would have liked to have a more feminine daughter – someone who was interested in clothes ad makeup and hair styles. But I’m not like that, and maybe for the rest of my life I’ll be what TJ once called a gamin. I’m sorry if that hurts you, but it’s just the way I am. (pp. 99–100, emphasis in original) As the narrative moves towards closure, Noli is taking steps to overcome her alcoholism, reconciling with her mother, giving up her longing for TJ, and is dating a new boy. Thus, she is slowing transforming herself from a lost and lonely soul to someone who has agency. In other words, Noli becomes a hopeful subject.

The dilemma of being between two worlds In this final section I examine two novels – Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (1990) and Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung (2006) – to explore how their female protagonists negotiate their own desires with the conflicting desires of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit. In Lucy, postcolonialism plays a significant part in shaping the ‘world between’ that Lucy experiences: a world between colonialism and postcolonialism, between white, American, liberal feminism and Indigenous, feminist epistemology, between home(land) and world. Lucy is both a romance and an anti-romance as its concern lies with the figure of the female exile. Rather than follow the familiar romance of an exile’s longing for home and the inevitable celebratory return, Lucy is a counterpoint to such an exile narrative by insisting on the uncertainties and ambivalences of desire, place, and belonging. In Alice Pung’s memoir, Unpolished Gem (2006), the narrator is an exile in her own home. The opening line states: ‘This story does not begin on a boat’ (p. 1) – a reference to the ‘boat people’, a term used predominantly in the 1970s and 1980s to characterise illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who sought refuge in Australia and other Western ports. This allusive beginning assures readers that Alice (‘Agheare’) and her ChineseCantonese family are ‘legal’ Australian citizens and foregrounds that a different kind of immigrant story is about to unfold. But Alice, like Lucy,


also exists between two worlds – the confining, traditional home life of her parents and the liberal world that lies outside. Both texts are located within the discourses that inform post-feminist debates in the West, regarding women’s economic, professional, and sexual freedom. But unlike the girls in the Gossip Girl novel, Lucy and Alice do not have the same access to social and cultural capital as their white, rich, New York ‘sisters’. While Lucy and Alice have more in common with Jess (Bend It Like Beckham) than they do with these other female characters of privilege, they nevertheless have different individual struggles with their quest for subjective agency. Lucy and Unpolished Gem engage with stereotypical representations of the ethnic female subject through their characters’ self-reflexive accounts. However, these texts differ from those discussed to this point in that their reflexive accounting actively deconstructs and empties the stereotype of its romance, thus enabling a fresh and critical look at female desires and ethnicity (‘race’) in a post-feminist age. At age nineteen, Lucy realises her long-held desire to leave her island home of Antigua to live in a place far away. However, when she takes up a position as an au pair for a wealthy American family of six, disappointment overwhelms any feelings of joy. On her arrival she travels past famous landmarks, but where she previously imagined these as ‘points of happiness’ (p. 3), they are now viewed as ‘ordinary, dirty, worn down’ (p. 4). The romance of New York City that Lucy had fuelled in her imagination for so many years turns out to be a disappointing lover. Lucy the ‘young woman from the fringes of the world’ (p. 95) embarks on a project of the self whereby she notices ‘[I was] inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist’ (p. 134). Her transformation draws on the senses instead of rationalism as she develops a subjectivity that is grounded in the pleasures of unrestrained sexuality and resistant gendered identity. Lucy rejects her mother’s repeated warnings about promiscuity, which she feared would turn her into a ‘slut’. In her attempts to resignify as a gendered subject, Lucy engages in casual sexual encounters. These acts not only defy her mother’s authority, but construct her in ways that have previously been the privilege of men. To further distance herself from her saint-like mother, Lucy writes a letter to her mother (after hearing that her father has died) giving detailed ‘evidence’ that her ‘upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a slut was very enjoyable, thank you very much’ (pp. 127–8). The saint/sinner split is further enhanced when Lucy’s mother tells her: ‘I named you after Satan himself. Lucy short for Lucifer. What a botheration from the moment


you were conceived’ (p. 152). However, Lucy challenges the hierarchical nature of the binary by transforming this moment of devastating revelation into a triumph. As Mahlis (1998, p. 180) comments, this point seems ‘to mark Lucy’s moment of autobiographical self-creation: knowing the Lucifer of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucy enthusiastically embraces this heroic figure, exiled from paradise himself’. In a similar way, Lucy’s unbounded sexuality inverts the gender binary, which privileges masculine performativity over feminine. Both names – ‘slut’ and ‘Lucy’ – are linguistic acts that name and constitute Lucy’s discursively constructed body. Lucy’s active appropriation of these rebellious names with their biblical and Miltonic associations provides her with a choice whereby she is able to resignify her subjectivity in a way that breaks away from the norms of ‘corporeally enacted femininity’ (Butler, 1993, p. 232). A similar kind of maternal surveillance and attempted regulation of a daughter’s body occurs in Unpolished Gem. When Alice is born she keeps crying leaving her first-time mother at a loss as to ‘what to do with this little creature with the howling hole in her face’ (p. 14). Her mother’s indifference to her baby is not shared by her father who greets her arrival as ‘Good News! … because this is Paradise, and his baby is born into it’ (p. 15). This new Paradise baby is named after a character from a children’s book, and like that character this daughter ‘will grow up in this Wonder Land and take for granted things like security, abundance, democracy and the little green man on the traffic lights’ (p. 16). While Wonderland might be the utopian Australia of her father’s imagining, Pung writes of the reality of her life in an immigrant Chinese family living in the working-class suburb, Footscray, in Melbourne, and its impact on her gendered subjectivity. The material and discursive realities that constitute the gendered experiences of her mother and grandmother in relation to home and homeland are radically different from Alice’s experiences as a first generation Chinese-Australian. Alice’s mother governs her daughter by threat and warning. As the go-between who exists in the space between her mother and her grandmother, young Alice is both the listener and the teller of tales, hearing and retelling complaint narratives told by her adversarial maternal figures. For this, her mother threatens abandonment: ‘“You are so evil,” my mother tells me one night, very upset, “that I’m going to take your brother and go away with him”’ (p. 32). Intergenerational stories are told by mother and grandmother, but whereas the grandmother’s stories nurture a bond with Alice, the stories from the mother paradoxically alienate and ensnare Alice within the mother-daughter space. In a similar way to Whistle Me Home, both Lucy and Unpolished Gem deal


with feminist concerns of connection between women as a means for developing identification and belonging, but the texts complicate this desire by highlighting the tensions between gendered generations and familial relations. Sugg (2002, p. 161) comments that the practice of ‘rooting cultural identities in home-places and familial relations’ demonstrates ‘how the rhetoric of love, intimacy, and home constrains female subjects into a logic of belonging that presupposes an inside/outside binary’. I see this inside/outside binary in spatial and emotional dimensions in these texts. Whereas Lucy sees her mother’s love for her as ‘a burden’ and ‘designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and … I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone’ (p. 36), Alice becomes the echo of her domestically confined, housewife-mother: ‘I rarely ventured outside anymore, not even into the backyard’ (p. 72). As Alice’s solitude becomes self-defining, she becomes the mother – caring for her siblings, cleaning the house, washing, cooking. When she complains about doing housework and asks why her brother Alexander can’t look after her siblings, her mother replies: ‘He doesn’t know how to look after babies. He’s a boy. Besides you are more responsible and mature than he is’ (p. 94). This inscription of Alice into a gendered relation to home and family echoes Lucy’s mother’s script for her daughter to become (like her) a dutiful wife and nurse, both narratives propagating a ‘myth of unimpeachable femininity’ (Whelehan, 2005, p. 33). Despite the mothers’ attempts to have their daughters join them in a chorus of ‘home sweet home’, both girls envisage different futures. At age thirteen, Alice is inculcated into the world of popular romance via Dolly fiction and compares her addiction to ‘the way stuck-at-home housewives devoured Fabio romances’ (p. 95). However, she soon discovers that she is unlike any of the Dolly characters, and ‘even the Asian girls in those romances were named Momoko or Ginny and came from educated middle-class families’ (p. 95). Though these books give her unsatisfactory romance narratives, the ‘coming of age’ books of Judy Blume explain menstruation and the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Her first period is met with further instructions and prohibitions from her parents, who paint a picture of dangerous masculinity – all boys are rapists, and all men are either perverts or paedophiles (pp. 96–7). As a teenager, Alice dismisses the possibility of a Dream Lover, preferring instead to imagine herself as the ‘Proletarian Princess’ and not a princess in a tower waiting to be rescued. Proletarian or not, Alice is still immersed in the romance of the princess.


Lucy, however, tolerates no such romantic musings. Her delighting in the bodily pleasures of sex are not confused with romantic love. With Hugh she notes ‘ I enjoyed myself beyond anything I had known so far’ (p. 66), but declares: ‘I was not in love’ (p. 67). Similarly, she sees her sexual relationship with Paul as a novel ‘adventure’: ‘I had not known that such pleasure could exist and, what was more, be available to me’ (p. 113). This expression of sexual freedom without romance is at odds with Alice’s restrained sexuality that accords with her parents’ idea of proper, Chinese feminine behaviour. When Alice takes her boyfriend Michael up to her room when her parents are not home she knows she is breaking their cardinal rule. Although Alice is ambivalent about the idea of having sex with Michael, it is the taboo image of him in her room that gives her ‘consolation and power’ (p. 254): I didn’t necessarily want to sleep with him, I just wanted to see what he looked like in my room, and let the image set itself in my mind for eternity so that every time I felt the walls closing in, I would be able to pull it out of my mind like a developed Polaroid tucked carefully between the pages of an illicit diary. (p. 254) Alice judges others girls who have sex with their boyfriends, seeing them as ‘stupid’ and deceitful and ultimately becoming like a ‘ventriloquist’s doll’ slumped in the lap of a boyfriend glaring ‘at any girl who dared cast looks at her boyfriend’ (p. 255). Alice desires to be different from other girls; she believes that by not having sex she will not become ‘faulty goods’ (p. 270). And so her declaration that she cares ‘bugger-all for lofty romance’ (p. 270) is only a temporary state as she plans to be intact when she eventually marries. Both Lucy and Alice are aware of the possible consequences of adult female sexuality. For Alice, she fears becoming ‘faulty goods’ for a prospective husband. For Lucy, the risk of pregnancy is assuaged by the knowledge that her mother’s herbal remedy will ‘bring on a reluctant period’ (p. 69). Thus, desire takes different paths for Lucy and Alice but ultimately they share a desire to gain autonomy and self-recognition. My focus in this chapter has been on desire and in particular the internal dilemmas that arise within the social norms of gender that frame desire. Jess, Noli, Lucy, and Alice wrestle with the desire for that which is forbidden or denied, but which would give agency and pleasure. These fictional female characters are caught on the horny dilemma of sexuality: desire or proscription. Rather than choose one option over


the other, they are inclined both to separate from home and community and to fulfil their desires for independence. Despite the popular post-feminist ethos of the Gossip Girls series, which embraces a girlie femininity in its advocacy of female empowerment, the characters’ experiences of the vagaries of romance nevertheless carry the enduring promise of quest and conquest, transformation, and recognition. As the texts in this chapter demonstrate, romance itself is the paradox describing through its rhetorical seductions the contestations of gender and sexuality as subjects attempt to overcome obstacles in order to know the Other and thereby the Self. As Butler suggests: ... fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home. (Butler, 2004, p. 29) Our engagement with such imaginative possibilities may fulfil our desires and deliver unspecified pleasures.

2 The Beauty Dilemma: Gendered Bodies and Aesthetic Judgement

[N]o woman escapes ‘beauty’. Unavoidably, from her earliest years, beauty will be either attributed or denied to her. If she does not have it, she may hope to gain it; if she possesses it, she will certainly lose it. But what exactly is ‘beauty’? (Pacteau, 1994) When Pacteau above asks: ‘what exactly is beauty’ the answer is elusive. The question of beauty has entertained philosophers since the time of Socrates and Plato. Freud, too, considered beauty elusive, beyond explanation: The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to find any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and as usually happens, lack of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. (1953, p. 83) In describing beauty or what has developed as a theory of aesthetics, arguments hinge on key organising principles, such as − attributes, value, function, form, perception, psychical distance, disinterest or objectivity. However, as Dickie (1997, p. 167) points out, what began as an objective theory of beauty (whereby beauty was held to exist independently of human beings) was gradually replaced by more subjective notions of beauty, or, specifically, taste, as a characteristic of human subjects. Deleuze’s (1994) notion of ‘intensity’ offers an interesting path to explore when trying to consider aesthetics as different from, or a 59


complement to, previous accounts that relied on form to convey taste, beauty, and pleasure. For Deleuze, the aim of art is to produce a ‘sensation’, a sign which is an ‘encounter’ rather than a ‘meaning’. This Deleuzian sense of ‘an encounter’ offers significant opportunities for thinking of the encounter readers/viewers have with a range of children’s texts across novels, picture books, films, and other aesthetic products. For Deleuze these ‘encounters’ become ‘events’ as well as representations. To demonstrate this point, I refer back to Tom Feelings’s illustrated text The Middle Passage, discussed briefly in the Introduction. As I mentioned, this book offers a tableau of represented images of the body in pain and torture. This is one way of reading and understanding the figures in relation to their representation. A Deleuzian interpretation would consider what is painted in the tableau ‘is the body, not insofar as it is represented as “object” but in so far as it is lived as experiencing sensation’ (Deleuze quoted by Polan, 1994, p. 239). Misson and Morgan also consider aesthetics as ‘a kind of intensity’ (2006, p. 32). For these writers, aesthetic objects (or texts) have an intensity that moves the reader/viewer/player to want to become involved with those objects because they display this quality. This kind of intensity emerges in cultural products produced and marketed for children – their visual, auditory, and tactile sensations operate as an intense ‘force’. My example later in the discussion of the Bratz dolls demonstrates how the marketing aesthetic attracts children’s attention by creating attitudes and desires that orient them towards wanting to possess these dolls and to purchase a range of accessories. Other texts similarly work to position readers into seeing and valuing in particular ways by engaging them affectively through their aesthetic discourses. In many ways, youth and beauty have become the holy grail of modern consumer societies. Imagery of youth depicted as a sensuous, celebratory form of masculine or feminine ideality has long been part of the Western aesthetic. Such imagery is abundant in popular cultural texts (fiction, film, magazines, toys, games, and websites) targeting children and young people. There is a double irony at play, however, as the young desire to be older, the ageing desire to be younger. Western culture’s obsession with youth and ‘cuteness’ is noted by James R. Kincaid as amounting to ‘cultural arrested development’ (1998, p. 105), a situation which is played out to its logical yet improbable extreme in Mary Rodgers’s children’s novel, Freaky Friday (1972). The story documents the experiences of a mother and her daughter when on one ‘freaky Friday’ they find that they have switched personalities and bodies,

The Beauty Dilemma 61

and subsequently experience (and ultimately come to appreciate) each other’s subjectivities.1 As this chapter’s focus is on ‘the beauty dilemma’, my interest lies in considering how texts variously engage readers/viewers in the contradictory discourses of beauty as desirable and dangerous. These contradictory discourses are of course evident in the ‘real’ world and the function of narrative often depends on ‘showing us particular discourses in action, often clashing with each other, certainly supplementing each other to give a sense of the breadth of the world being depicted’ (Misson & Morgan, 2006, p. 51). I therefore consider practices of subjection that attempt to position girls and women as vulnerable or imperfect, as well as a productive aesthetics that offers more optimistic outcomes, sensations, and affects. Masculinity is also caught up with aesthetics, but arguably the female body is subjected to a more prevalent form of censure and surveillance. In exploring how fictional texts written for children and young adults engage with matters of beauty and the beauty ideal, I consider how these texts draw our attention to the significances and effects of different aesthetic discourses, and the kinds of sensations or intensities that the aesthetic experience offers. In considering youth’s location and investment in the beauty scene, this chapter also considers the other side of beauty by exploring examples of texts that celebrate an aesthetics of disgust. By engaging with discourses of beauty and ugliness (refinement and disgust), my aim is to investigate how these extremes are used in texts to disrupt or confirm dominant gender norms. An aesthetics of disgust is not something new, as the aesthetic has always engendered varied and complex pleasures. As mentioned above, pleasure encompasses our intense engagement with texts by fulfilling some of our many faceted desires for beauty, harmony, and joy, as well as for revulsion, despair, pain, and horror (Misson & Morgan, 2006). As its designation of ‘disgust’ implies, this form of aesthetics is always in relation to traditional aesthetics, but, more significantly, the term heralds a return to theories of the aesthetic in the aftermath of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and Second Wave Feminism. By utilising post-feminism and other ‘post’ theories we can complicate the problematic representation of women and men by offering pleasurable and desirous experiences which are outside frameworks of objectification, image, and representation alone. As the above account foreshadows, my discussion covers a broad range of texts across age and genre and uses diverse but complementary theoretical perspectives. Some of the texts discussed in this chapter


provide counternarratives to the beauty ideal in different ways: by exposing the negative practices of subjectification that frame youth identity in late-capitalist societies. and attending to the micropolitics of post-feminism by providing examples of how everyday women and girls gain subjectivity (or a sense of ‘becoming’) through aesthetic encounters and events.

Promises, promises: The fantasy of the beauty ideal The body is ‘the fantastic mise-en-scène of our desires’ (Bronfen, 2000, p. 111). For Bronfen, the body is the interface between physical materiality and its visual or narrative representation. Located at this interface is the body, which is the subject of both aesthetic and scientific discourses. These discourses attempt to distinguish between beauty and monstrosity, between masculinity and femininity, between nature and culture, and between the living and the dead (Bronfen, 2000, p. 112). The body as the object of representation of our fantasies and desires is something that has long interested artists, novelists, poets, and songwriters who have tried to capture the quintessential qualities of beauty and desire in their works. While beauty is an attribute of an object or a person, it has the capacity to seize both the heart and mind of the beholder; indeed, the narcissistic self is also the fascinated beholder of its own beauty. Perhaps, Plato2 was right when he said that beauty is the object of love; whether this is a love for the self or another seems immaterial. One can become seduced, captivated, excited by the sight of beauty. Beauty can take our breath away, cause us to go weak at the knees, stammer, become speechless, fix our eyes. We can be gripped by desire to possess it, or it can offer a quiet space for contemplation. That a beautiful person or object would have such varied sensory and physiological effects on an observer seems incomprehensible, but the paradox of beauty is that it is both a possibility and an impossibility. Part of this impossibility lies in the never-fulfilled desire for beauty. When Leonard Cohen wrote the song lyric, ‘I came so far for beauty’, he captured in a few words the elusive quest to possess someone, a beauty, for whom one would leave all others behind. While a Lacanian view would see Cohen’s song as a searching for beauty as based on lack, loss or absence, a Deleuzian application would see his lyrics and music creating sensations of sound and image that resonate with each other, with a force that has productive and creative energies (he wrote a successful song after all). While much of the imaginary and symbolic figurations of the beautiful subject suggest that the body is the cause of desire, in Gender


Trouble (Butler, 1990a), Butler claims that the body is not the cause, but the effect of desire (p. 71). For Butler, the body is constructed by discourse and the law, and is not ‘merely matter’, although in Bodies That Matter (1993) she concedes that there is such a thing as a ‘physical body’. Given this privileging of the body and accompanying debates that move between its corporeal reality and its imaginative representations, between cultural construction and independent existence, how do texts for young people and the critical discourses that surround that writing actively participate in these debates? This question underpins the discussions that follow particularly as notions of agency and subjectivity are caught up in the dilemma that sees the body as a site of cultural commodification or objectification, and as a site for agency and an expressive subjectivity. These two positions underpin the dilemmas of post-feminist and post-structuralist thinking as they continue to repeat binary debates. In her discussion of feminism and beauty, Janet Wolff (2006, p. 144) states that ‘feminists have had good reason to distrust the discourse of beauty’. While discussions of the objectification of female (and male) bodies and the universalising assumptions about aesthetic value and beauty have become familiar, Wolff argues that nevertheless there is ‘a place for beauty – a return to beauty – in post-critical aesthetics’ (p. 148). Beauty sells – the bikini girl draped across the Porsche is still good for business – but consumers are perhaps both aware and unaware of how such blatant promotion reproduces the politics of gender. The contradictions and unstable features that constitute post-feminism centre on the body. Gill (2007, p. 149) posits some of these contradictions with respect to: objectification and subjectification; self-surveillance; individualism, choice and empowerment; dominance of the makeover paradigm; and the sexualisation of culture. Furthermore, as Gill points out, these gendered themes coexist with often silenced discourses about race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability. As the opening epigraph attests, beauty is a problem. If you have it you are bound to lose it, and if you don’t have it, you want it. This point is given explicit confirmation in the picture book Willy’s Mum (Tulloch, 2008). As the title makes clear, the subject of the story is the unnamed woman known only for her status as mother of Willy. The main focaliser is Willy’s dad. With his digital camera in hand, Willy’s dad documents the woman’s daily moves, foibles, and physical short-fallings. But the third person narration shifts between different points of view from the three characters – Dad, Willy, and Mum. Such shifting points of view through a multiple focalisation process offer counterpoints of


perception and different ‘truths’. For example, at one point, the narration focalised through Willy openly states that some of Dad’s accusations are false: ‘Willy suspects that some of these things are not true’. This picture book illustrates Arthurs’s point that ‘the maternal body in particular is the grotesque body par excellence’ (1999, p. 142). It also illustrates Eagleton’s point that ‘aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body’ (1990, p. 13). In Willy’s Mum, the focalised account offered by Dad and his video camera ‘evidence’ of Mum looking tired, angry, relaxed, and dribbling when snoozing, expose the female body’s failure to meet the demands of the beauty ideal. This focalised account from the adult male character’s point of view uses light irony and sarcasm to undercut competing perceptions about Willy’s mum to contrast her perception of how she looks and behaves with the ‘real’ perception of the male other. The illustrations serve as counterpoints to the words. However, the visual gives a ‘truth value’ that is arguably more persuasive than the words, and denies the woman’s claims (repeated on her behalf by the narrator) that: ‘Willy’s mum would also like to add: she is 100% wrinkle-free, her tummy does not stick out, and her bottom is actually tiny’. The veracity of these statements is undermined by the illustrations (see Figure 2.1). As noted in the previous chapter, our notion of reality is informed by what we see, and the visibility of empirical data offers access to a truth that we may fail to question. Other ‘truths’ or ‘empirical data’ about the mother are that she is a shopaholic who suffers from a severe case of shoe fetishism, ‘gets up early every morning to shave all over’, was bought by her partner at a ‘Mum-Shop where Mums come in three different flavours; chocolate, strawberry or hokey pokey’, and is ‘nearly 100 years old’. And as a further reminder of society’s fetishising of the youthful body, Dad produces a photo album showing what ‘Mum’ looked like when she was 20. But rather than see her as a youthful beauty, Dad interprets baby Willy’s curiosity over the photographs as ‘wondering who the crazy one really was’. These visual accounts of the female body as I have discussed to this point are firmly placed in old structuralist and psychoanalytic terms which are caught up in discourses of phallocentrism. For example, the gender binary is reinforced through humour and comment conveyed through word and illustration. The humour shows up the childish behaviour of Willy’s dad who feels that he is hard done by because of the attention Mum gives to their baby, Willy. This Oedipal take on desire for the Other places both baby and father in competition for the mother’s attention. The father desires what his son desires but feels that


Figure 2.1 From Willy’s Mum by Scott Tulloch, reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers

she belongs to Willy (which can be seen as an unfortunate name or a fitting linguistic pun given the context). These forms of humour and the contradictions between words and illustration provide complex processes of interpellation, since readers are being addressed indirectly by a number of focalisers who are all potentially unreliable. The text offers no discourse of revenge for the female character or retribution for the male’s insensitivity and cruel words. The result is that ‘Mum’ remains the object of the readers’ scrutiny and while Dad is clearly a prat and wears a T-shirt that states that he is ‘BAD DAD’, the woman remains fixed in a stable set of gender relations. Her body and performative acts (as perfect mother, compulsive shopper, undisciplined consumer) play on and offer implicit support for common gendered assumptions about women. Deleuzian ideas offer us other ways for engaging with this text; ways that might disorientate the discourses of phallocentrism and traditional aesthetics outside psychoanalytic and (Second Wave) feminist theories and their notions of agency and subjectivity. In doing this, we can ask if there is another beauty at work in this text – one that relies on


aesthetic resonances of colour, movement, and energies. In doing so, I do not wish to negate or justify the immature, disturbing, misogynistic elements which are part of the narrative and focalising structure. These elements may very well be intended to show their negativity, rather than offer an endorsement. Deleuze suggests that we should open up beyond seeing our ‘selves’ as subjectivities, as identities trapped within the stratifying structures of a capitalist, phallocentric world (Kennedy, 2000, p. 75). To do this relies on connecting with the text to create new ‘assemblages’ that are productive in themselves and not necessarily attempts to impose order or logic. Visually, Willy’s Mum offers a domestic mise-en-scène, which vibrates and resonates in a variety of contrasting rhythms. The pace of the narrative is rapid as words are broken into fragments and illustrations appear in a varied sequence of vignettes, close-ups, changing perspective and size. This playful engagement with the book’s spatial framework sets up a resonance with the body and mind of the reader. Sequences of domestic harmony and chaos are created through an array of visual perspectives, movements, and use of colour. Colours are bright and intense, conveying a sense of familial and domestic joyfulness, not cruelty, coldness, or hostility. The multiple focalisation that conveys different points-of-view through words also carries points-of-view through the visuals, as I mentioned above. Thus, we can witness the effects of this changing focalisation and other ‘truths’ or, more correctly in a Deleuzian frame, ‘sensations’. For instance, we are given visual vignettes of Mum and Willy in loving embraces and sharing pleasurable activities together (reading a storybook). We also see Mum enjoying a pleasurable solitude (reading, eating her favourite lollies, snoozing). These images of the body at play, at rest, alone and in company, invite a seeing of the female body not as represented object, but as lived and experiencing sensation. In this way, the picture book as an ‘event’ of experience connects with the reader through its visual narrative that is both delightful and disturbing. Consequently, how this text is understood will depend on a number of social and aesthetic attitudes, experiences, and knowledge with respect to: gender norms, family dynamics, subversive forms of humour, and the interplay between words and visuals in picture books. Texts cannot force readers to accept their propositions or to be fully aware of the authors’ intentions. Readers, especially young children, may find pleasure in reading picture books, such as Willy’s Mum, by attending to the many elements that attract them. For others, perverse pleasures come from the misogynistic discourse or from resisting this discourse. Also, other more Deleuzian pleasures might be derived from the readers’


encounters with an aesthetics of sensation. As this example illustrates, the site at which the images of beauty or its lack, its sensations, occurs is the body. The body gives material shape and lived sensation to concepts such as beauty, perfection, or ugliness. The aesthetics of the female body that this picture book offers articulates both its materiality and its cultural and sensory value. Like other examples that follow, Willy’s mother’s body is not a ‘real’ body; all are represented bodies that stand in for paradigmatic exemplars of perfection or deviations from those paradigms.

What price beauty? As the previous example demonstrated, the aesthetic is not necessarily tied to beauty, although beauty is often called into service as a way of justifying or proving the aesthetic value of something. Hence, the adage Beauty is in the eye of the beholder suggests both truth and complacency: a diplomatic impasse where debate is foreclosed. This section continues to enquire into the fantasy that constructs the desire for beauty. But rather than consider fantasy from a psychoanalytic perspective, I consider fantasy in terms of the kinds of wish-fulfilment that come when our desires are mobilised in ways that make us want or crave something or someone. Thus, ‘beauty’ in this discussion is not something to do with ‘taste’ or judgement of taste, but an intensity or a force that is part of a process which takes precedence over form. My heading suggests that there is a price to pay for beauty. Indeed, my argument is a simple one: fantasy often comes with an economic value. Apart from our own imagination and play with others, we often must pay to be able to enjoy the fantasies that others construct for us through aesthetic products. Human physical beauty not only sits on the surface of the skin but permeates the epidermal layers reaching into all parts of the human body/mind, affecting capacity to be successful in a world where superficiality appears more important than substance. Beauty is therefore not simply something to behold or to admire from a distance. Rather, it is something to acquire, because it brings its own rewards (or so we are told) – friends, popularity, success, wealth, and – most importantly in the words of the sponsor – ‘a new improved you’. All this is possible if we treat ourselves to the right cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic procedures or surgery, and gym membership. However, the commodification of beauty is not an historically recent phenomenon as Paula Black notes in her book, The Beauty Industry (2004). As Black explains, beauty therapy is part of a vast and profitable multinational industry and, while its


roots can be traced to the mid-Victorian period (or possibly before), it was only after the Second World War that the industry began to consolidate (p. 20). Black sees this development as coinciding in the 1950s with the culture of femininity whereby cosmetic and beauty product use was seen no longer as the province of Hollywood and the theatre, but something that the average woman could now purchase to ensure that ‘natural femininity’ was assured. As Black says, ‘artificiality is sold under the guise of a natural, already-present femininity’ (p. 35). However, the hard sell today targets a growing demographic comprising children and youth. The messages that companies and websites use to promote beauty products extol a number of positive aspects – the empowering, playful and social benefits – which we could see as the influence of postfeminism and postmodern individualism. A case in point is the marketing success story of the Bratz dolls. These dolls have a similar currency to that once enjoyed by their predecessor, Barbie.3 However, they differ from earlier items because online marketing has facilitated a wider network of consumption through websites, blogs, and online shopping services. Bratz products have swept many children and their mothers into a buying frenzy. These 10 inch (25 cm), sexy party dolls with ‘a passion for fashion’ have enormous amounts of hair, pouty lips, made-up eyes, oversized heads, and street chic outfits. Given the targeted age of consumers for Bratz (from 4–8 years) it is surprising that the profiling of the Bratz girls includes adult tastes (e.g. Yasmin’s fave food: Mediterranean food; fave movies: romantic comedies; fave books: chick lit with happy endings; and fave music: Black Eyed Peas). There is undoubtedly a social networking aspect to the Bratz site as girls can email registered friends (and strict protocols about online behaviour are outlined), but in terms of our interest here, these cultural artifacts unashamedly attempt to ‘sell’ forms of agential subjectivity for girls. For example, one of the dolls, Jade, is described on the Bratz site in the following way: ‘Jade’s unique sense of style and attitude makes her the girl everyone admires!’ Such glowing endorsement is in itself an enticement to purchase her and in a sense become her. The marketing of agency is located in a new social and economic order that previously had been the reserve of boys. Commodity culture articulates a complex of fiction and fantasy, of regulation and persuasion, which reinforce a gender binary and a kind of second wave victimisation brand of femininity. Valerie Walkerdine sees these kinds of relentless calls to make over oneself into an ideal femininity run the risk of young girls and women ‘consumering themselves into being’ (2003, p. 247). In


short, they position girls in varying ways in relation to the rise of neoliberalism with its often schizophrenic forces which on the one hand promote a self-determining, do-it-yourself identity, and on the other reinforce the risk of failing to secure this idealised go-girl femininity. For gender to be achieved it ‘requires constant performance and reiteration for its existence’ (Butler, 1990a, p. 85). The never-ending aesthetic labours involved in performing femininity too are always unfinished and incomplete. This connection between performativity and the material body highlights how aesthetic labours occur at the ‘site’ (body) that is already discursively constituted. Accompanying the labour is knowledge: knowing how to make the best of yourself, knowing how to use cosmetic products to achieve maximum benefit, knowing what colours, style, shape of clothing suits your body type (which is itself another form of knowledge), knowing what foods to eat or to avoid, knowing how to pluck, wax, shave, style, and dye. As Adkins (1995, p. 181) notes, ‘in the very process of growing up female, a woman will learn how to police the boundaries of her own looking and being a woman’; for girls, the aesthetic process is about becoming women. And when the products don’t work, there is always cosmetic surgery. Increasingly, teenagers from all parts of the world are undergoing cosmetic procedures (skin peels, collagen implants, botox injections) as well cosmetic surgery (nose reshaping, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, double eyelids, gastric banding).4 Despite the documented increase in elective cosmetic surgery for young people, there is limited research available about serious side effects and long-term risks (Zuckerman, 2005). Cosmetic surgery, however, is not a straightforward topic. It too raises dilemmas. From Kathy Davis’s (1995) perspective, cosmetic surgery is a means whereby a woman can bring the physicality of her body into line with her image of it. In this sense, cosmetic surgery is a liberating act. However, Negrin (2002) contends that Davis’s liberating take on cosmetic surgery underplays the structural constraints on women which lead to the dissatisfaction with their bodies in the first instance. This point becomes a critical issue in the YA novel Sara’s Face (Burgess, 2006) discussed later in this chapter. The embodied physical subject is inevitably yoked to identity. Furthermore, the issue of appearances is tied to an individual’s sense of well-being and ‘looking good’. An earnest interest in the body in an everyday sense began to emerge in the 1980s with the proliferation of aerobics, gyms, health clubs, and personal trainers offering (potential) clients a range of services to achieve the ideal body: slim, taut, toned,


with a sculptured musculature. This new pursuit of the ‘body beautiful’ was, and continues to be, linked to economics. Bordo (1993), in particular, has explored the ways in which dieting, exercise, and cosmetic surgery are the means (or ‘technologies’) by which bodies are reshaped to ‘fit’ with cultural norms of beauty and acceptability. However, while middleclass women are arguably the targeted focus of advertisements offering ‘a new improved body’, men, too, are encouraged to lose weight, work out, and undergo electrolysis to remove unwanted (‘unsightly’) body hair. The implicit and often explicit message is that slim, good-looking people are more successful, sexier, and more popular than fat, ugly people. Words such as ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ are always inscribed negatively and reach beyond mere corporeality. Fat is something to be dealt with by being excised or eliminated from the body. Roald Dahl set the standard for ways of dealing with obese children with his creation of Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous child in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1973). The Oompa Lumpas’ song leaves no doubt how loathsome this boy is: Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop! The great big greedy nincompoop! How long could we allow this beast To gorge and guzzle, feed and feast On everything he wanted to? (p. 84) Augustus’s gluttony is dealt with in an extreme way as he literally gets his just desserts after he is turned into ‘a luscious bit of fudge’ (p. 86). Fat busters are everywhere in society, flushing out their quivering victims, ready to point the finger of shame. While obesity does bring certain health problems, fat young bodies are the new target for exercise and pedagogical campaigns and products. In 2007, Bindi Irwin, the then 8-year-old daughter of the late Steve ‘Crikey’ Irwin and Terri Irwin, owners of the phenomenally successful Australia Zoo, starred in her own exercise video, Bindi Kidfitness, which is promoted with fat-busting slogans such as: ‘We’re fighting fat with fun’ and ‘We’re taking the bite out of obesity. Coming to a store near you. Crikey!’ The economic imperative remains interwoven with the health-and-fitness message. In the video, Bindi, backed by the ‘Crocmen’, dances and sings songs with their exercise message. Bindi’s youthfulness is given a certain authority by the presence of the adult male backing group. Interspersed are images of tiny Bindi expanding to a gargantuan size as she warns children of the dangers of overeating. The video is an


example of the kind of contradictory messages that many cultural products carry for children about their bodies. The body is presented as a potential source of power and energy, but it is undisciplined and requires constant monitoring, working out, reshaping, and consumer spending in order to become acceptable and attractive. The media spotlight on women’s bodies has widened to capture aberrant children whose fat bodies disrupt our adult fantasies about youth as a time of carefree slimness and natural beauty. In a related way, the concerns over obesity in children have seen education authorities in many developed countries (e.g. USA, Canada, Australia)5 developing programmes to encourage ‘fat’ children to exercise and lose weight. Despite the emphasis on a healthy body, the fat body carries a heavy burden as it is the object of derision and abjection. In a cultural context, imperfect bodies challenge cultural norms, ‘eliciting not admiration and desire but disgust’ (Brand & Devereaux, 2003, p. xii). In the television series The Biggest Loser,6 viewers are positioned to experience the whole gamut of emotions from sympathy to disgust, scorn, praise, and admiration. The underlying message is a moral one: fat is bad, slim is good. Aesthetic judgements are invariably entwined with ideological interests and social structures; an arena in which these are made painfully obvious is the beauty parade.

Beauty on parade: Little Miss Bimbos with attitude A recent website that has caused much blogger and media interest worldwide is the Miss Bimbo: Virtual Fashion Game site (http://www. missbimbo.com/) (see Figure 2.2). This UK site mimics the original French site Ma bimbo, jeu virtuel de bimbo (http://www.ma-bimbo.com/). The worldwide interest generated by Miss Bimbo has resulted (at the time of writing) in the website team apologising for a temporary stalling of the game due to the unprecedented number of players entering the site (currently nearing half a million ‘registered bimbos’). The team has also yielded to media pressure by removing the option of purchasing diet pills from the game. Two further disclaimers state that any comparison between Miss Bimbo and Paris Hilton is unfortunate and, with a tongue firmly in the cheek, they protest mock indignation that such a comparison ‘does a dis-service to the players whom [sic] send their bimbos to university, tea parties or chess tournaments’ and ‘we would also like to remind players that the Miss Bimbo team assume no


Figure 2.2

From Miss Bimbo website, reproduced by permission of Blouzar

responsibility or liability for any fashion faux pas, hair style disasters or boob jobs incurred in real life as a result of playing the Miss Bimbo game’. As the screen capture above illustrates, players can shop for their virtual Miss Bimbo doll, visit places including the salon for tattoos, piercings, tanning, or the clinic for a facelift, breast surgery, therapy. However, a warning is given for items in the clinic advising players that this is a virtual game and real life surgery or therapy is a different matter. A CNN report, ‘Alarm as dolls get breast implants in “Miss Bimbo” game’ (28 March 2008), explains the economic exchange factor of the game: Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game’s clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars … Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site … And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important ‘mula’. (CNN report, 2008)


The 23-year-old web designer Nicolas Jacquart, who is credited with creating the game, reportedly defends the game: It is not a bad influence for young children. They learn to take care of their bimbos. The missions and goals are morally sound and teach children about the real world … The breast operations are just one part of the game and we are not encouraging young girls to have them, just reflecting real life. (quoted in CNN report, 25 March 2008) Despite the claims of self-empowerment, social responsibility, and friendship networks made by Miss Bimbo, Bratz and other consumeroriented sites for young girls, the most enduring feature lies in their attention to the body as the site of personal investment – emotional, financial, psychological, and physical. As Debra Gimlin argues in her book Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (2002, p. 141) ‘in a society that equates the body with both self and moral worth, cultural meanings are attached to physical differences, so that the body provides a foundation for oppression based on gender, class, ethnicity, and age – all social characteristics that are deeply embodied’. One site in which the consequences of this oppression due to physical differences is made abundantly clear is in realist films about beauty contests. Films such as Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) and Beautiful (2000) disclose the behind-the-scenes drama, plotting, and manipulation of beauty contests. While these films have either teenage girls or adult women as their subjects, Little Miss Sunshine (2006) is a film about a children’s beauty contest. What these films have in common is their attempts to expose the process by which females become ‘to be looked at’ by highlighting how the beauty contest is a cultural practice where the aesthetic substance is scrutinised and the commodity value of women and girls is exposed. The visual fetishisation of girls is not restricted to beauty pageant films, as many Disney films, such as The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas, rely on the seductive appeal of the pre- or post-pubescent female body which is modelled on shapely adult ‘female’ bodies.7 Since Mulvey (1975, 1989), the dependence of realist cinema on the female form for visual pleasure has been an acknowledged feature of feminist film study and has prompted feminist filmmakers to make their mark on the aesthetic terrain by providing an alternative way of representing women as subjects in the very medium that traditionally has drawn its pleasure from the female. In her book, Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (2006), Geetha Ramanathan explores the relationship


between the feminine and visual pleasure by engaging in Teresa de Lauretis’s notion of a ‘deaesthetic’. Through her examination of a selection of films, Ramanathan explores ‘the myth of the innocence of aesthetics’ by drawing attention to the way the films confront the ‘trope of woman as commodity in different contexts – the commercial, the familial and the informal’ (p. 11). I draw, in part, on Ramanathan’s study of aesthetics and the female subject in film to inform my discussion of how Little Miss Sunshine attempts to expose the fake aesthetic of the child beauty contest by holding it up for scrutiny and exposing its commodity value. The film was made for mainstream audiences by husband-and-wife directorial team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who have an impressive background in music video and other commercial productions. The plot of Little Miss Sunshine concerns a family (the Hoovers) who embark on a cross-state journey so that the youngest child, sevenyear-old Olive, can realise her dream of participating in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty competition. The irony is that Olive is the antithesis of the Little Miss Sunshine ideal: she is chubby (her pot belly is the object of scrutiny at several points and its exaggerated size is probably due to a prosthetic) and short-sighted (attention to this deficit is underscored by an oversized pair of spectacles). Despite her physical ‘deficiencies’, Olive is determined to participate in and win the beauty contest; this desire to win is one that drives other participants (and their mothers). By jointly constructing Olive in the shape of her name and as a female subject who desires to be visually noticed and aestheticised, the film raises a dilemma inherent to post-feminist sensibility. It is, as Gill observes, that ‘Women are not straight-forwardly objectified but are portrayed as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so’ (2007, p. 151). Olive avidly watches and replays adult beauty contests and rehearses the smile, the stance, the way a kiss is blown to the audience. This televisual instruction in coy beauty practices is complemented by a titillating physical workout by Olive’s coke-snorting grandfather who teaches her how to growl, prowl, and claw, simulating the sexual antics of strippers he has observed over the years. While Olive remains an innocent in terms of her own sexuality, her knowledge of how to be sexy exemplifies what Gill sees as a modernisation of femininity that incorportates a new ‘technology of sexiness’ (Radner, cited by Gill, p. 151). Little Miss Sunshine also draws a relationship between class and aesthetics. Olive’s family is described in promotional sites as being ‘one of the most engaging dysfunctional families ever brought to the screen’


(http://video.barnesandnoble.com/). The Hoover family can be seen as ‘dysfunctional’ in that: grandfather (Edwin) swears openly in front of Olive and has a drug habit; brother (Dwayne) has taken a vow of silence and will only communicate by writing notes; father (Richard) is a failed motivational speaker; uncle (Frank) is a suicidal, depressed Proust scholar. The only ‘normal’ person is the mother (Sheryl), who is concerned about her family and worries how Olive will handle the inevitable disappointment of not winning the title of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’. Nevertheless, the family acts as a unit and together they overcome all obstacles along their journey in order to support Olive in her quest. When the family arrives at the beauty contest (a minute before registration closes) they are met with unfriendly, judgemental, middle-class women who attempt to block Olive’s participation. The division between ‘normal’ and ‘dysfunctional’ is schematised as oppositional class aesthetics. Ramanathan cites Pollock’s notion of proletarian and bourgeois bodies. Pollock’s proletariat body is ‘sexual, immoral, bestial, body, diseased, disorderly, unclean, corrupting’ (quoted by Ramanathan, 2006, p. 27). This description fits the Hoover family on most accounts (grandfather dies on the journey but they continue, taking the corpse wrapped in a hospital sheet in the back of their station wagon). Pollock’s bourgeois body is ‘asexual/sexually controlled, soul, moral, spiritual, healthy, orderly, clean, purifying’ (p. 27). These characteristics generally map onto both the female organisers of the competition and the mothers who groom their daughters as participants. The Hoovers are chaos and the structure that supports the beauty contest is control. When the young participants go through their various routines they look and act like adult beauty contestants. They are skilled at dancing, singing, gymnastics, but are especially skilled at being beauty contestants. As James Kincaid notes, the children who participate in these kinds of activities ‘devote nearly all their short lives to making themselves worthy to be scrutinized’ (1998, p. 103). The girls wear sexy outfits and do their best to create an eroticism through their enthusiastic and rehearsed participation in commodity fetishism with their stylised hair, adult-styled costumes, and sexy bodily moves. But it is nevertheless a surreal fantasy and one which lacks any real erotic charge (except maybe for paedophiles). One of the fathers in the audience (a bikie of large proportions) stares with detachment at the passing parade of Lolitas. While the mothers in the audience smile approvingly, Olive’s family squirm uncomfortably at the sight of the cosmetically aged children, and their fears – that innocent, overweight Olive will be


laughed at – grow by the second. The audience too is positioned to feel uncomfortable in viewing the fetishisation of the girls as sexual objects, with images of JonBenét Ramsey still stored in our collective memory.8 However, when Olive appears dressed in a modest outfit befitting a master of ceremonies – with top hat, buttoned-up white shirt, black vest, black tights – we are unprepared for what follows. Before she begins, Olive asks the compère for the microphone whereupon she announces to the audience: ‘I want to dedicate this to my Granpa who showed me these moves’. The appreciative sighs of the audience are soon erased when Olive strips away the layers of her outfit and begins a raunchy routine with loud heavy metal backing music. While the other girls had played at being sex kittens, Olive embodies the sexual tiger, an enthusiastic predator who prances around the stage engaging in simulated sexual movements and clearly delighting in the performance. Olive’s dance routine embodies Pollock’s description of the proletariat aesthetics as being sexual and bestial, but more significantly perhaps it raises the dilemma of female self-representation. On the one hand, it can be argued that Olive has no agency in her representation as she was coached by her grandfather who instructed her in the ways of male fantasies of female eroticism. On the other hand, Olive’s performance challenges the hypocritical attitudes of the organisers and the structure that endorses eroticism under the guise of an innocent aesthetics. As the level of disapproval mounts during Olive’s performance, her family decides to show their support by joining her on stage and dancing with a similar joyfulness. At this point, the family presents as a united group and their carnivalesque disruption turns the tables on order and bourgeois aesthetics. Both Miss Bimbo and Little Miss Sunshine contribute to the dilemmas about the relationship between aesthetics and the female subject. These texts embody a version of post-feminism through their notions of choice, empowerment, and pleasing oneself (Gill, 2007). Miss Bimbo unashamedly exploits the consumerist ethic and leaves any notion of gender politics to the consumer if he/she so desires. The website embodies the pleasure principle which gives the illusion that the ‘registered bimbos’ are autonomous agents who can do (and buy) as they please. Olive too can be read as simply pleasing herself, but Little Miss Sunshine provides layers of narrative for exploring female subjectivity in relation to beauty practices and aesthetics. Its conclusion of a happy, united family who accept that they are forever banned from participating in another Little Miss Sunshine competition is the kind of win-win situation that appeals to mainstream audiences. But the


film’s contribution to gender discussions lies in the ways it opens up for scrutiny socially constructed ideals of beauty and how these come to be taken up by young girls and reinterpreted to serve their own or another’s purposes.

An aesthetics of disgust: Looking on the bright side of abjection In her article on the paintings of oversized fleshy, female nudes (usually self-portraits) by Scottish artist Jenny Saville, Michelle Meagher employs the term ‘an aesthetics of disgust’ which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. While Saville states that her paintings are intended to confront and to be ‘difficult to look at’, Meagher provides an interesting theorising of Saville’s work in order to ‘propose new modes of thinking about feminine embodiment’ and ‘the problem of experiencing oneself as disgusting’ (2003, p. 24, italics in original). Working with Meagher’s theorisation and with reference to Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject, I want to turn now to the film Real Women Have Curves (2002) and the picture book The Flim-Flam Fairies (2008) to explore how these texts for young adults and children can be seen as deploying an aesthetics of disgust, and the dilemmas they raise with respect to embodiment. Real Women Have Curves can be regarded as a teen, coming-of-age story that centres on Ana, a young Latina high-school student who, in postfeminist terms, has a ‘doubly “wrong” body: she’s zaftig [plump] and ethnic’ (Holmlund, 2005, p. 118). Ana is played by America Ferrara, who also plays the eponymous character in the Ugly Betty American television series, written and directed by Fernando Gaitán based on his Columbian telenovela Betty la fea. The unattractive, eponymous Betty is hired as a personal assistant to the fashion magazine Mode. This juxtaposition of physical states of ugliness and beauty is one aspect of the competing aesthetics the series engages with. Another aspect concerns how an aesthetic can be manufactured to look real. Ferrara’s ‘Betty’ is manufactured in a way that makes her look ‘ugly’; the character is de-aestheticised by false, bushy eyebrows, fake braces on her teeth, an ugly wig, and clothes and make-up. Real Women Have Curves also ensures that Ana is not glamourised in any way. She wears baggy overalls, non-descript, shapeless T-shirts, track pants or jeans, and no make-up. Ana’s body confronts the gaze of her mother and presumably the viewing audience by refusing to conform to a system of cultural ideals that coerces women and girls to see their bodies as deficient or in need of modification.


Ana makes it clear that she is happy with her own body, despite the constant taunts and enticements from her mother to lose weight: ‘If you lost weight you could be good looking’, her mother laments on one occasion. Her mother’s pet name for Ana is ‘butterball’, which is hardly conducive to good self-esteem for a young woman growing up in thinness-obsessed Los Angeles. Yet, despite these negative and pejorative comments and nomenclatures, Ana refuses to see herself as disgusting. This refusal to experience herself as disgusting is underscored in two scenes. The first is when she decides to have sex for the first time with her boyfriend. As the foreplay begins, the boy turns out the light. However, Ana turns it back on and stands naked before the mirror and says ‘see this is what I look like’. Her statement and viewing of herself in the mirror is not one of embarrassment but an appreciation of the body to which she ‘lays claim’ as her own (Butler, 2004, p. 21). Consequently, this scene and much of the film privilege Ana’s point of view and construct her subjectivity. Ana is not the passive object of the male gaze. At a narrative level, she takes the initiative to have sex and to take off her clothes with the light on. At the level of the image, she offers the boyfriend and the viewer the vision of her body through her own vision as she looks at her nakedness in the mirror. However, this scene is not desexualised; after all, it is about imminent sexual play. More significantly, her bare shoulders and partial exposure of her bare breasts charge the scene with a transformative eroticism. Fat, de-aestheticised Ana is also a beautiful, young, sensual woman. What makes this moment pleasurable for Ana (and possibly the viewer) is that it is without artifice. Ana is not only a consenting subject, but participates with pleasure and self-awareness. The second instance occurs when Ana strips off to her bra and underpants in an effort to cool down from the oppressive heat of her sister’s ‘sweatshop’ dress-making factory. Her mother is horrified at the sight of Ana’s bulging, fleshy body and asks: ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ Ana encourages the other women to also take off their clothes. The stripping inverts the usual striptease as these women’s bodies show Caesarian scars, stretch marks, cellulite, folds of fat, wobbly legs, large breasts, and fatty stomachs. The women are critical of their bodies and give a detailed assessment of their deficiencies as they compare imperfections and bulk. But shame is quickly erased with a sense of reality – this is the way ‘I’ am – ‘the body as it is lived’ (Meagher, 2003, p. 34). This ‘doing’ of their bodies as a material reality that has skin and flesh, that moves, has a shape (‘curves’), resists public censure within the enclosed space of the factory. The mise-en-scène for this stripping works to undermine the male gaze. As Mulvey has explained, the male gaze can only


function when the female character is objectified and fetishised. This scene undoes that tradition of fetishisation: the women are unadorned, their hair is unstyled, and their underwear is functional not seductive. While the women face the camera, the camera is placed at a respectful distance: a middle long shot disavows the viewer any voyeuristic pleasure from seeing up-close the bodily signs of minor imperfection – the cellulite, the marks, and scars. Despite the film’s attempt to pull back from encouraging viewers to be confronted by the sight of imperfect (real) flesh through camera angle and distance, an aesthetics of disgust is taken up by the women themselves through their words and bodily displays. This aesthetics of disgust is a refusal of disgust, and an overt confrontation with ideals of beauty. In this respect, Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming’ has significance. (Butler, 1990a, also uses the word ‘becomes’ with respect to gender, which she sees as an ongoing discursive practice.) To Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming’ is a process of desire which cannot be explained as purely natural or biological: ‘neither the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a form’ (1987, p. 272). In order to rethink bodies outside of binary structures and polarisations of form or beauty, the women in this film are ‘real’ (as its title attests); real not just in their images of an imperfect female form (if there is a perfect form from which to judge them), but real in their desires to ‘become women’ who embody an aesthetics premised upon sensation, affect, energy, and intensity. The rapport between them is more convincing in this scene and possibly more effective than in other post-feminist films which celebrate superficial female bonding such as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005). Nevertheless, the scene of the semi-naked, laughing women standing side-by-side facing the camera gives ample time for the viewer to pay attention to the image on the screen. This focus on the ‘physicality of disgust’ confronts the viewer visually and ideologically. As Meagher says: ‘an aesthetics of disgust should alert us to our bodily response, but it should also encourage us to investigate the origins of that bodily response’ (2003, p. 31). The women’s voluntary participation in the spectacle brings to the forefront the ‘political’ that has been central to feminism for decades. These scenes give expression to Meagher’s point regarding the ethical implications of a cultural system ‘that regularly establishes boundaries between different types of bodies: rendering some beautiful, some acceptable, and others simply disgusting’ (2003, p. 25). The stripping off in the factory scene reinforces the film’s politics that attempt to reclaim the female body from a hegemonic construction of feminine ideality as petite, slim, taut, and decorative. (The small-size dresses the


factory makes are a constant reminder of the large-size women’s failure to measure up to society’s ideal.) Ana’s mother refuses to remove her clothes, remains disgusted by the spectacle of the semi-naked women and defiantly leaves the factory. By exiting, the mother attempts to keep herself at a distance from the women and therefore is unable to connect with this ‘event’ and the aesthetic space they have claimed for themselves. The film resists a common post-feminist theme of the makeover as a necessary step before the heroine can emerge ready to ‘kick ass’. But it can be seen as engaging with a post-feminist transformation that comes with a sense of renewal and self-control. The aesthetics of disgust plumbs new depths in the picture book The Flim-Flam Fairies (2008) by Alan Katz and illustrated by Michael Slack. This book is part of an age-old tradition in children’s literature that attempts to delight children with gross forms of humour that are intended to make adults cringe. One of the early picture books to delight in the disgusting was Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman (1979). While Fungus and his world of slime, dirt, and smelly odours offers a world which is the inverse of our obsessively sanitised Western world, the illustrations and text invite readers to view a world that is intended to both fascinate and repulse. In a similar way, Shrek’s bathing in swamp mud and killing fish with his flatulence are intended to strike a note of repulsive delight with child viewers (see Chapter 1). In The Flim-Flam Fairies, the affective force of the images of snot, ear wax, clipped toenails, boogers, dirty underwear, and belly button lint is openly defiant of limits that demarcate good taste and vulgarity (see Figure 2.3 below). But in drawing attention to itself, the visual and verbal descriptions of excess signify all that marks the unstable boundaries of the body, when its bodily fluids, substances, and gases are no longer restrained or contained. These masculine flim-flam fairies differ significantly from the more familiar iconography of fairies in that they are neither beautiful nor feminine. The flim-flam fairies embody Kristeva’s abject as they transgress taboos and violate aesthetics releasing a kind of pure jouissance or deep pleasures (1982, p. 9). They muscle in on the tooth fairy’s territory, offering readers perverse images which seek to transgress and displace the norm/al, the polite, and the conventional. From the opening page, the narrative sets up the opposition to the wholesome tooth fairy with a mocking distaste for her sweetness: Each time, the tooth fairy comes, takes the tooth, and leaves a small gift – like a quarter or a book. How sweet. How kind. HOW LOVING. HOW SickeNiNG!


Figure 2.3 From The Flim-Flam Fairies by Alan Katz, illustrated by Michael Slack, reproduced by permission of RP/Running Press Kids, a member of Perseus Books Group

Consequently, the depicted male child (and perhaps the implied male reader) are encouraged by the ugly, uncouth, flim-flam fairies to put under their pillow ‘lint out of your belly button’, ‘a gob of earwax’, ‘dirty underwear’, ‘clipped toenails’, ‘something juicy out of your nose’, ‘fart’ and so on. The horrified tooth fairy does her best to stop their


nonsense, but fails. After appealing to the reader to not listen to these ‘fake fairies’ and their lies, she regains her composure and apologises, exits the page with words that ring of insincere checkout spiel and advertising mantra: ‘Have a nice day. And be good to your teeth. Ta-Ta!’ The visual excess of the book with its contrasting colour scheme, changing font, images of chaos, and verbal and visual clutter is imbricated in the narrative but also goes beyond the narrative to articulate different affects and sensations. At the narrative level, ‘beauty’ is in play in the text through its absence or its opposite. In this respect, The Flim Flam Fairies is a subversive rejoinder to the commodification of cuteness and innocence that abounds in children’s books. Every bookshop has its share of ‘Fairy’ books depicting pretty, pastel fairies with glitter sprinkled liberally over its pages. These books are marketed to appeal to girls and are just one aspect of the lucrative fairy business which ranges from fairy shops to fairy costumes, wands, wings, makeup. The Flim-Flam Fairies creates a masculine imaginary that resists the fairy beauty myth by engendering an affect of disgust, repulsion, and distasteful pleasure. However, whether the intended readership is male or female or both, this book in its grossness deliberately disrupts conventional standards of taste and decorum, which have been associated with hegemonic cultural constructions of femininity and feminine virtue, and traditional aestheticism. By revelling in disgust and ugliness, the book opens up for all readers an ambivalent space for the pleasure that comes with an aesthetics of disgust and subversion. Nevertheless, the space is realised at the expense of a feminine imaginary, thereby conforming to a traditional gender binarism and archetype. The image of ‘woman as hysteric’ is revisited through the tooth fairy, whose escalating hysteria is conveyed in two ways: through typographical emphasis as she screeches – ‘STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY!!’ and through her own transformation from a benign, smiling fairy to an angry, grotesque figure. To ensure that she does not have the last say and that order will not be restored, the final image shows ‘the poop fairy’ with his ominous-looking brown bags who asks ‘Am I too late?’ The stunned tooth fairy in the background appears to faint, thus losing control of her body and her narrative authority (see Figure 2.4). Real Women Have Curves and The Flim-Flam Fairies claim an aesthetics of disgust for different purposes. While the two texts embody disgust in their treatment of the abject, Real Women Have Curves is the one that dares to propose a representation of the female body and feminine embodiment which forces us as viewers to confront our own bodily experience and the conditions which shape our understanding of (or reaction to) the abject


and the process of abjection. The Flim-Flam Fairies causes disgust by giving explicit attention to the properties of abjection that Kristeva (1982) identifies as emitting from inside the body such as vomit, saliva, and excrement (and by extension, earwax and so forth). In their treatment of disgust and grossness these texts are not alone in children’s publishing

Figure 2.4 From The Flim-Flam Fairies by Alan Katz, illustrated by Michael Slack, reproduced by permission of RP/Running Press Kids, a member of Perseus Books Group


(see McGillis, 2003) or in texts produced for young adults. Real Women Have Curves encourages viewers to think about their reactions to a female body that deviates from a cultural system that distinguishes between different types of female bodies: ‘some beautiful, some acceptable, and others simply disgusting’ (Meagher, 2003, p. 25). The Flim Flam Fairies carnivalises an aesthetics of disgust by drawing attention to a subversive disruptive intervention against norms of social acceptability. This picture book is clearly a case of boys (with wings) behaving badly and its shockjock-style humour can be seen as a backlash to the sensitive new male of the ’90s and a reclaiming of a boys-will-be-boys bravado that sorts out the sissies from ‘the real’ men. The male fairies’ physical unattractiveness further emphasises their revelling in an aesthetics of disgust. Both texts deal with bodies that are deliberately intended to disturb the sensitivities of some readers/viewers, and in so doing highlight the gender politics which permeate each in different ways. Real Women Have Curves parades and questions these disturbing spaces of gender and female bodies through a process of transformation. The Flim-Flam Fairies also parades these spaces but prefers to remain confrontational, rather than transformational.

Extreme makeover: Uglies and Sara’s Face This chapter began by posing the problem of beauty. However, ‘the problem of ugliness has troubled psychologists and philosophers for several thousand years’ (Hagman, 2005, p. 104). As Hagman points out, ugliness was often considered the painful opposite of beauty, and even more cruelly, the aesthetic equivalent of evil. Fairy tales are replete with examples of the ugly character as evil incarnate – ogres, witches, crones, demons, giants, gnomes, and monsters. So too contemporary stories continue to yoke ugliness to the undesirable, the inhuman, the pitiful, or the ridiculous. Both beauty and ugliness provoke reactions in the perceiver. In the case of beauty, the reaction is often admiration and praise, whereas ugliness often may provoke fear and repulsion. However, as Hagman suggests, ‘accompanying these reactions is often, paradoxically, fascination, even attraction’ (p. 109). This is most vividly illustrated in the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast where Belle, who initially is repulsed by the fearsome-looking Beast, eventually falls in love with him because of his kindness. And her love is rewarded when the Beast is transformed back into a handsome prince. In this instance, ugliness doubly succumbs to beauty. While there are many examples of the negative responses to ugliness, there are also those stories where the ugliness interacts with a character’s sense of self. The experience


of ugliness from a subjective perspective involves strong negative emotions about one’s body such as disgust, fear, anxiety, terror, and repulsion. Examples of YA fiction that discuss these reactions by both self and other include: body scarification – Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (Crutchett, 1993); anorexic body – Killing Aurora (Barnes, 1999); dwarfism – The Speed of the Dark (Shearer, 2003); amputated limb – Idiot Pride (Zurbo, 1997); and severe deformity – Mortal Engines (Reeve, 2001). I want to turn my attention to two YA novels: Uglies (Westerfeld, 2005) and Sara’s Face (Burgess, 2006). Both are contemporary cultural allegories that consider the consequences when modern science and technologies are used for extreme purposes to change a perception of ugliness. These books deal with one of the ironies of commodity culture, namely, that difference is both celebrated and condemned. In marketing beauty and a particular beauty ideal, difference is called into play. Those who are not beautiful (and therefore, promoters argue, need the products the most) are clearly ‘the other’, or ‘the Uglies’ as they are termed in Scott Westerfeld’s novel of the same name. Paradoxically, the beautiful subject is also ‘the other’ as she or he represents something that the majority are not. The discourse about difference and ‘otherness’ which was evident in the previous discussion is given a different kind of treatment in Uglies. This book offers a counternarrative that works against the consumerist aesthetics of our times which celebrate a particular kind of beauty based on notions of ideality according to body shape, facial symmetry, hair, skin tone, and other physical attributes. Westerfeld’s novel exposes the ugly side of beauty by showing the monstrous and manipulative dimension of the beauty myth. Uglies is the first of a trilogy (including Pretties, Specials) and introduces readers to a time in the future when children up to the age of 16 are known as ‘Uglies’. They live in dorms in a boring and regimented place called Uglyville, but on their sixteenth birthday they are taken to New Pretty Town, a high-tech paradise where cosmetic surgery is performed to turn them into Pretties. Thus, this future world takes an exaggerated view of our present world which categorises people according to their physical attractiveness or perceived lack of beauty. In this future world of the novel, other identity attributes such as class and ethnicity seem to have disappeared. Furthermore, gender is not privileged as both boys and girls become Pretties. It is difficult to know the appeal of this series for young people as its stories are bizarre and absurd. Westerfeld delivers his cautionary tales with a heavy hand, making them didactic and moralising. Despite these


reservations, Uglies has won the Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association in 2006. I suggest that the popularity of the series lies in its own aesthetic textuality as much as with its subject of aesthetics, beauty, and youth. The novel begins with the following words: ‘The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit’ (p. 3). Its closing lines resonate with the words of Dirty Harry: ‘“I’m Tally Youngblood,” she said. “Make me pretty”’ (p. 425). In the first instance, the text disrupts previous romantic notions and descriptions of summer skies and thus sets out its ironic agenda from the outset. The title tells us it is about ‘uglies’ so ugly is what we get when we open the book and read the first line. The closing line not only provides a segue to the next book in the series, entitled Pretties, but offers a challenge that makes sense only when one has travelled with Tally and the others throughout this first story. Another significant aspect of the textual aesthetic is the incorporation of familiar descriptions of rich, pretty young people that one reads in Who magazine or on blogs about celebrities and models. The incorporations of descriptions about the Pretties and the Uglies (who could also be termed tweens) will no doubt offer resonances with readers and their experiences or knowledge of the world. For instance, when Tally discovers some old magazines from the past (the readers’ present) she is unable to comprehend the kind of woman photographed: The woman looked like she was starving, her ribs thrusting out from her sides, her legs so thin that Tally wondered how they didn’t snap under her weight. Her elbows and pelvic bones looked sharp as needles. But there she was, smiling and proudly baring her body, as if she’d just had the operation and didn’t realize they’d sucked out way too much fat … ‘What on earth is she?’ (p. 199) When Shay explains that the woman is ‘a model’, Tally remains puzzled until Shay explains that a model is ‘kind of like a professional pretty’ (p. 199). The scene, like many others throughout the book, instructs readers about the female bodies and the culture of slimness and beauty. Tally even recalls ‘that disease’ that her teachers had told her about, one that young girls got ‘back in the days before the operation’ (p. 199). Thus, in terms of young people’s engagement with this series, I suggest that pleasure comes in part from recognising familiar aspects of their current world with its promotion of a particular bodily aesthetic, the fast pace of the narrative, and its ironic, at times cynical, tone.


The story engages with beauty in other ways, drawing readers attention to its elevation through technology to a state that is no longer beyond the reach of the majority. Uglies are in a liminal space and are essentially non-subjects, whereas becoming a Pretty is a path that is already mapped out for everyone. Thus, in this future world of the text, becoming, unlike in the Deleuzian sense, takes on a specific physical form. From a young age, children are told about the old world (the readers’ world) where the ‘Rusties’ exploited the environment, waged violent wars, killed animals for food, and used archaic forms of transportation. The Uglies know only what they are told and information is strictly controlled by the Special Circumstances group (the ‘Specials’). Young children, known as ‘littlies’, make ‘morphos’ or images of how they want to look when they become Pretties (similar to Photoshop computer software). The life of the Pretties is one of excess: parties, fun, clothes, food, alcohol. Pretties don’t have to think and choice is limited to what clothes to wear at the next party. The spell that Pretties cast simply by being beautiful is captured by Tally, a female Ugly who initially escapes Uglyville and the mandatory surgery: ‘There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so … pretty’ (p. 8). Tally’s words echo the implicit messages of current consumerist hype, that gives a truth value to physical attributes so that people come to believe (both in this novel and in contemporary society) that a pretty, childlike appearance engenders a perception of vulnerability and the need for protection. While readers are positioned to view Pretties as superficial, mindless, and self-centred, the deeper implication is that ‘beauty’ or being pretty is both a singular state of being and a generic term for a number of disparate experiences and characteristics. In psychoanalytic terms, the desire for beauty is attained in this narrative, but when it is reached it still suffers from lack. Thus the Uglies are taught to desire beauty because they lack it, but the desire and its promises are never fulfilled. In this novel, there is no beauty with brains. Uglies is a cautionary tale for our times as it takes readers to the extreme edge of a world that responds to the ‘what if?’ question that speculative fictions engage with: What if we all became pretty? What then would the world be like? In Uglies, it’s not a pretty sight. The paradox of beauty in Uglies is that while beauty is visible on the surface of a Pretty’s body, its ugly side develops from within. When Tally’s friend Shay becomes a Pretty, her brain is covered with lesions


which destroy memory, and the capacity to develop other problems is yet unknown. This ugly side of beauty is captured in this excerpt: Tally thought of the lesions on Shay’s brain, the tiny cancers or wounds or whatever they were, that she didn’t even know she had. They were in there somewhere, changing her friend’s thoughts, warping her feelings, gnawing at the roots of who she was. (p. 397) The fantasy, that being pretty brings eternal happiness, is disrupted by the knowledge (for the reader) that Pretties have brain damage as a result of the operation. This means that Pretties can never understand real-life problems, and they lose the ability to develop empathy, qualities which are generally regarded as essential to the human condition. Perhaps the most significant loss is that Pretties have no agency. Before the operation, Uglies have a choice: they can attempt to run away to the wilds of the Rusty Ruins and carve out a hard life away from the comforts and technological advantages of New Pretty Town, or they can have the surgery and enjoy a life of mindless partying. But once they are turned into Pretties they are forever under the control of the Special Circumstances group. Furthermore, their individual identities are lost to a collective identity: they become part of ‘the Pretties’, with their baby talk, immature behaviour, and meaningless existence. Consequently, only those Uglies who have the courage to break away from their society and forge an identity that is not based on looks achieve agency. Westerfeld’s account of a society where the hierarchical social arrangement is, as I mentioned, based on youth and beauty corresponds in many respects to the world that today’s teenagers are growing up in. However, Uglies attempts to show that when beauty is no longer the object of desire and when becoming popular is not the driving motivation, then the fantasy that shapes that desire collapses under the weight of normality. This scenario inverts the popular notion first put forward by Aristotle: ‘to the beautiful belongs the right to command’ (quoted by Montaigne, 1958, p. 337). However, the Pretties, despite their beauty, have no such power or right to command. The defining point then is that beauty loses its power when it becomes ‘normal’. In the sequel, Pretties (2005), we learn that members of the ruling Special Circumstances group have been converted from ‘Pretties’ to ‘Specials’ by having their lesions removed so that they retain the necessary cognitive ability to exert adult power and control. Furthermore, their pretty faces have been surgically changed into ‘horror movie looks’ with


their ‘wolflike teeth and cold, dull eyes’ (p. 154) intended to terrorise everyone. This turn to horror undoubtedly provides readers who enjoy sci-fi and horror fiction with the kinds of pleasures that come from the perverse. Sara’s Face is also allegorical in the ways it can be seen to draw on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1912). In Shelley’s novel, Dr Victor Frankenstein is the scientist who creates a monster, a creature he never names. Written during the time of the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century, a time of rapid social change and progress in science and technology, Frankenstein warns of the ‘over reaching’ of modern industrialisation and issues a dire warning about scientists who ignore the dangerous consequences of their more controversial experiments. In a related way, Sara’s Face tells of the dangerous and fatal consequences when scientists use technologies to perform radical surgery on individuals in an attempt to discover ways to create perpetually youthful appearances. Dr Wayland Kaye assumes the Dr Frankenstein role; he is the unscrupulous surgeon who experiments, with disastrous results, with ways to graft a face from one body onto another. His endeavours are financially and philosophically supported by the ageing rock star Jonathon Heat, who represents real-world celebrities who undertake cosmetic surgery to remain popular and appear ever-youthful. Heat resembles most closely the American pop star Michael Jackson in that like Jackson he too has numerous cosmetic surgeries, which result in his facial structures collapsing to create an unnatural appearance. Heat’s appearance becomes so monstrous that Kaye makes a series of lifelike masks to cover his disfigured and exposed face. Kaye experiments with the body parts of animals and eventually human faces in his quest to revolutionise facial surgery and achieve his ultimate goal of ‘the full face transplant’ (p. 27). At one point Kaye removes the snout of a dog and transplants it onto the front of Heat’s face (p. 28), with the result that: ‘No one could see the star’s real mouth underneath it, and the nose, teeth and lips of the dog were obviously genuine’ (p. 29). Kaye’s determination to experiment regardless of the outcome nevertheless produces its own set of affects for women. Heat’s new look gives him a beastly appearance, which women find attractive and men try to copy. This instance speaks to the fantasy that frames desire to be like someone else, to shape one’s appearance in a way that identifies with another. It also speaks to the misogynist fantasy of feminine desire for the beast: the dangerous male who has power over women. Both Uglies and Sara’s Face focus on one part of the human body – the face – and its capacity to attract others and be the source of identity.


This abstraction of one part of the body to serve as a synecdoche for the whole body can also be read as the part standing in for the moral account of the whole person. The idealisation of the subject (whether the Pretties or Jonathon Heat) is premised on the body, particularly, the face which becomes the focus of projected desires and unrealistic expectations. Both novels approach their subject in a similarly didactic manner and as such they serve as instructive tales for the young, warning of the evils of cosmetic surgery and the idolisation and cloning that celebrity culture engenders. Both texts are horror stories, but each offers different accounts of youth agency. In Uglies, a group of young people who actively resist the surgery to become Pretties choose to live a life that is a return to a more natural world. Here their choice is between two extremes, and is only available in the short space when young people still have a mind of their own before the operation erases agency and the capacity to make critical judgements. In Sara’s Face, the narrator is an inexperienced journalist who attempts to make sense of the story of the rock star Jonathon Heat and his young protégé, Sara Carter, whose ambition was to become famous. Sara, like many young people who have a Facebook presence, uses a video diary to give an account of her thoughts and daily events. Thus, the video record provides a form of testimony of the facts, but is of course a construction that blurs fantasy and reality. Sara we are told is a pretty girl, ‘highly desirable’ (p. 16); but she selfharms by cutting herself and hates her face and body. When Jonathon Heat offers to share his home with her, he becomes a Svengali-like figure in the control and power he exerts over the increasingly dependent and dysfunctional Sara. Such is his spell and her desire for fame and change that she willingly succumbs to cosmetic surgery at the hands of the incompetent and unethical Dr Kaye. Sara’s desire to erase her face and get a new one can be seen as an identity makeover first and foremost. Her actions in one sense are a result of the hold Heat has over her, but her self-loathing is a driving force, even when she has seen first-hand the bungled results of Kaye’s surgical efforts on the disfigured face of Heat. While Sara’s face is saved and remains intact, she nevertheless changes her name and identity to ‘Lucy Smith’. The tabloid story of Sara’s life and her mystery disappearance mean that she not only achieves her goal of becoming famous, but she also achieves the ultimate celebrity goal of becoming elusive and mysterious. In discarding her name, Sara becomes Lucy. After he interviews her, the narrator explains in the ‘Epilogue’ the enigma that Sara Carter has become: ‘She told me nothing was real, that everything was real, that she had been


both cured and murdered. Surely that was enough’ (p. 263). And finally, she requests that the narrator include her words as an epilogue: ‘Just put me in … as an epilogue. That’s all I really am. An epilogue to Sara’s life’ (p. 263). With these final words Lucy speaks of her old self (Sara) as a mystery woman, which recalls the ‘feminine mystique’ that has enveloped notions of beautiful women for centuries. But her reference to her story as real, but not real, and her statement that she was both cured and murdered posit the contradictions and ambivalences that shape the fantasy of the beauty ideal as something both real and unreal, created and destroyed. For Sara to exist as an epilogue – the part that comes after the story, but which is nevertheless a comment on what has been told – demonstrates that she is both present and not present. This ambivalence complicates the simple opposition between the oppressive agents (Heat and Kaye) and an oppressed, implicitly passive, female subject (Sara). In becoming Lucy, Sara is no longer visible to the eye of the beholder as she is replaced by Lucy who becomes the ‘epilogue to Sara’s life’. This relation between past and present selves suggests a different way of perceiving Sara/Lucy as not simply a split personality in psychoanalytical terms, but as a complex ‘assemblage’. In this Deleuzian interpretation, the body is not perceived as just corporeal, but becomes a set of continuous flows, energies, organs, affects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I conclude this chapter with a closing comment from a memoir ‘Beauty and the Bête Noir’ by Meera Atkinson (2004, p. 120): ‘How much more she was worth than beauty alone’. Atkinson is talking about her mother who died at the age of 63, a woman who was considered by all who encountered her to be beautiful. Indeed, Atkinson came from a long line of beautiful women: ‘I have observed others’ responses to my mother, my grandmothers, and my aunts and have been the unwitting apprentice of the great importance and burden of appearing beautiful’ (p. 111). Atkinson’s account of ‘the burden of appearing beautiful’ provides insight into the way women in her family felt the need to live up to beauty’s demands, which in her mother’s case included breast implants, nose reshaping, wigs, dieting, and make-up. Atkinson describes her own coming to terms with a beauty that eluded her much to the disappointment of her mother and grandmother. This memoir gives the practical side to the beauty ideal, and like the texts I have discussed it gives voice to young people’s daily traversing of the cultural mediascape that attempts to shape and contain youthful energies and desires with its prohibitions and enticements regarding ‘ways to be’


and ‘ways not to be’ in a culture obsessed with beauty, youth, and a consumerist ethic. The fictional texts discussed in this chapter are unable to give the concept of beauty a fixed and stable meaning, so Pacteau’s question in the epigraph to this chapter remains elusive. My analysis of these texts has attempted an engagement with the aesthetic, as both subject and form, and the various ideological, theoretical, and textual possibilities for its interpretation. The narratives I have explored cover a wide range – cautionary tales, tales of female agency, the carnivalesque and playful – and have also provided me, and hopefully readers, with ways for rethinking the aesthetic with respect to the different perspectives of gendered categorisations, identities, subjectivities, and binaries. The beauty dilemma does not mean one set of practices over another. Rather, as this chapter has attempted to show, it is more complex. In exploring the challenging and often poetic ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and other theorists, we have found other ways to think about the tensions and contestations that encircle gender and beauty and how texts can be read as pleasurable, desirable, and disturbing outside familiar binaries and frameworks of the body as image and representation alone.

3 Gendered Cyber-Bodies: The Dilemma of Technological ‘Existenz’

The most perplexing moral dilemmas of this era are dilemmas posed by our skill at the creation of likenesses of ourselves, our world, our times. (Schwartz, 1996) The posthuman’s dilemma: ‘the sense of being an improved artifact and of having been once a fully human person’. (Wilson, 1995) Following the publication of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (first published in 1985), virtual reality (VR) technologies provided scholars across a range of disciplines with further avenues for exploring ideas about bodies, embodiment and disembodiment. In the year prior to Haraway’s article, William Gibson’s sci-fi novel, Neuromancer, was published. Gibson introduced the word ‘cyberspace’ and the novel established the cyberpunk movement – ‘an evolution of the science fiction (SF) genre that appropriates elements of contemporary society (and theoretical conjectures) and presents a narrative that both includes and extends the technological developments of today’ (see ‘Cyberpunk Literary Style’). Rather than exploring familiar interplanetary themes of alien worlds, robots, and outerspace explorations, cyberfiction written for young people (and similarly adult cyberpunk fiction) began to explore imaginative narrative and geographical spaces of the future where information systems, communications, and networks mapped on the real and virtual worlds that humans inhabit. At that time and into the 1990s, interest in new VR technologies1 spawned a surfeit of academic articles exploring the potentialities of virtual existence. 93


Accompanying these literary and academic explorations of the cyberpunk and virtual technologies, other aspects of the cultural landscape opened up new playing fields for children: Transformers™ were the top selling toy of the 1980s, and The Mighty Morphins PowerRangers™ was a highly popular live-action television series (Balsamo, 1996). Now, in the first decade of the third millennium, with the wide accessibility of the Internet, David Bell suggests ‘VR remains a key component of cyber culture, since it offers the promise of immersive and interactive environments that mirror cyberpunks’ imaginings more closely than the Internet’ (2001, p. 15). Apart from its applications for training environments and online and arcade games, VR (or alternative reality) has long been the inspiration for writers of fiction. Apart from the relatively short-lived cyberpunk trend, writers of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults continue to explore VR and other forms of cyberculture as a means for examining existence as being thoroughly mediated by technology. One area of technologically mediated existence is the posthuman. In their account of the posthuman, Halberstam and Livingstone provide a useful theorising of difference that has relevance for this chapter: ‘The human functions to … absolutize difference between the human and nonhuman. The posthuman does not reduce difference-from-others to difference-from-self, but rather emerges in the pattern of resonance and interference between the two’ (1995, p. 10). In children’s literature, Bradford et al. note that ‘the prospect of a posthuman future is invariably aligned with notions of dystopia, shaped by a humanistic hesitation about or suspicion of the far-reaching ideological and social implications of those developments within information theory and cybernetics which have been driving “posthumanism” since the 1940s’ (2008, p. 155). Underlying this sense of ‘suspicion’ about a posthuman future is the fear that an existence mediated by technology will radically alter taken-for-granted understandings of what it means to be human. The notion of a mediated existence is reflected in the chapter heading’s appropriation of ‘existenz’, a double borrowing from both David Cronenberg’s (1999) eponymous film (eXistenZ) and Karl Jaspers’s original concept of how one realises one’s personal meaning of life as existenz. Jaspers (1997) regards the totality of being as the ‘encompassing’ which comprises Dasein (consciousness) and Existenz (the transcendent as God). Cronenberg’s film also draws on this idea of transcendent as God as isten is Hungarian for God, and the Hungarian producers Anras Hamori and Robert Lantos, reportedly hid a pun – isten –in the title by capitalising X and Z to single out the word. The film, eXistenZ,

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explores how the boundary separating ‘real’ reality and ‘virtual’ reality often seems to blur or collapse. In the film, the designer (Allegra Geller) of role-playing game eXistenZ explains that it is ‘a game everybody’s already playing’, but it is powered through the players’ nervous systems via a bio-port implanted in the base of the spine. Allegra’s comment implies a foreclosure of the real, a position that speaks to Baudrillard’s (1994) notion of the loss of the real and reflects the view that there is no external reality, only a multiplicity of simulacra (Žižek, 1995). According to Baudrillard, there is no longer a ‘real’ external world to which signs can refer. Rather, we live in a culture of ‘hyperreality’ where the media defines the ‘real’. The film’s techno-enhanced bodies of the characters transform them into gaming cyborgs and the story raises ontological questions about the nature of reality and of simulated screen-reality in relation to existence and the game eXistenZ. By the film’s end, it also can be seen as raising a paradox that speaks to wider societal viewpoints: on the one hand, a technophilic celebration of the transcendence of the body; on the other, a technophobic concern that insists on a restabilisation of the real. This paradox or polarisation is evident in some of the YA novels discussed later in this chapter. The blurring of fantasy/reality occurs in a number of the texts I discuss in this chapter, and in many ways it is not an unusual narrative ploy for fantasy/sci-fi writing. Whereas the portal motif in fantasy writing has consistently drawn on a familiar object such as a door, a window, or a wardrobe as a frame through which the protagonist moves from the real world to a fantasmatic space, Slavoj Žižek asks ‘is not the interface of a computer the last materialization of this frame?’ (1997, p. 55). In our everyday lives, the computer screen is the visible means through which we communicate with a virtual universe to be found nowhere in reality. Virtual is the space we see on the screen of the interface, this universe of signs and images through which we can freely navigate. While we can don VR headwear and other body suits to enjoy the experience of VR, there is no other means in our reality whereby we could cross over the threshold that this portal appears to offer. However, fantasy has no such restriction. Žižek suggests that the gap between reality and fantasy is anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is an artistic technique that manipulates perspective so that two competing images occur in the one space. We have all witnessed anamorphic images when we see street markings for bicycle sections, or pavement art whereby a flat 2D image appears 3D when viewed from a different angle. The virtual environment we access via our computers or through an immersive VR application is anamorphic in that it gives a false impression of depth.


Another example of the fantasmatic real occurs in the film Lars and the Real Girl (2007) when the lonely, shy, Lars creates and purchases a lifesize doll from an online site. The doll (Bianca) is for Lars a real woman: she of course is ‘real’ in that she has a material presence, but she is not real in that she is not a living human. But what becomes interesting is how the people in the small community, out of their concern for Lars, come to accept Bianca as a real (human) person – she is elected to the school board, helps out in the local library, and is included in all the social activities. These examples point to the central question which underpins this chapter: How is existence/existenz mediated when real and virtual blur? In exploring this question, I remain interested in bodies as my previous chapters have discussed. Here my interest is focused on the complex relationship between technology and bodies and what this relationship means for reconsidering notions of dis/embodiment, self and subjectivity as mind in/out of bodies. Cybertechnologies, in particular, have created new discursive spaces for the performativity of gender and for breaking down Cartesian dualisms such as body/mind, human/machine. Technology mediates our existence by assisting new relationships with our own and other bodies, and opening up new subject positions. However, as the following textual examples illustrate, a technological mediation does not necessarily mean the end to gender and other embodied contestations that impact on our lived experiences. I appropriate the word ‘existenz’, partly as a playful gesture to the Cronenberg film and its theme of reality and fantasy being indistinguishable. I also use it to encompass the implicit themes of the fictional texts – being, freedom, recognition, and difference. These themes are relevant to Judith Butler’s (2004, p. 2) questioning of what it means to be human and to lead ‘a viable life’ (existence). These themes and questions are also ones that existentialists like Jasper considered in their accounts of the self as a free project of existence.

Virtually yours The three YA books that I discuss in this section – Virtual Sexual Reality (1994), Love. in Cyberia (1996), and Terminal Chic (2000) – were written by Chloë Rayban. Indeed, in reading these books from our present time one is immediately struck by how dated the technologies are and how technologically naïve the characters appear. For example, when Justine’s friend Chuck types in a web address, the computer-illiterate Justine is amazed: ‘Under Chuck’s hands the monitor seemed quite


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miraculously to understand the instructions and respond with obedience. It patiently purred and bleeped in a very professional fashion’ (1996, p. 41). Nevertheless, dates of publication aside, my argument is that despite any suggestion that cybertechnologies might be heralding new forms of gender relations by erasing difference, Rayban offers popular narratives for young people about virtual reality that can be read as inherently white, masculinist, heteronormative fantasies, which lack any subversive gender possibilities. Despite this overall assessment, I also see the text’s engagement with mind/body dilemmas as offering interesting philosophical and political possibilities. These books continue a legacy of ‘wired love’ (Goble, 2007), whereby technologies of communication and interactivity become objects of emotional attachment, and tentative, sexual engagement. Sexual attraction and heterosexual romance frame the three narratives. Whereas Chapter 1 explored how romance narratives construct desire and the uneasy gender relations that ensue, this chapter considers the complications that technology and posthumanism make to the pursuit of love and one’s existence. Just as earlier technologies such as the telephone and telegraph were employed by Modernist writers to pen stories of romance and ‘an erotics of communication’ (Goble, 2007, p. 406), the computer is the new technology that is the means for bringing together the central characters, Justine and Los (Love. in Cyberia and Terminal Chic), despite the fact that they are separated in space and in time by a millennium. In Virtual Sexual Reality, Justine experiences an altered state when she is turned into a boy, Jake, after going into an alternative reality booth at a VR exhibition. In both Love in Cyberia and Terminal Chic she time-travels via a computer, rendering cyberspace the point of connectivity and the space in which wired love or techno-romance takes place. Cyberspace via the computer is the portal to another world when Justine wishes to escape from her reality into a different time/space dimension. In her discussion of cyberpunk film, Claudia Springer (1999, pp. 214–15) suggests that these films treat cyberspace as a metaphor for the mind. Thus, characters’ motivation to escape via cyberspace/mind is characterised by a tension between opposing emotions: the desire to escape materiality (either the body or the environment) and the fear of psychological fragmentation and destabilisation of a unitary identity. A similar scenario is played out in these YA novels. Viewed through the philosophical lens provided by Karl Jaspers (1997), we can also see how these texts with their focus on the way communication between Justine and Los transcends boundaries of time and space come to constitute an intimate, personal relationship that entails existential possibilities of self-realisation as existenz.


The 1990s played a significant part in promoting the popularity and mystery which surrounded computers, particularly, the World Wide Web and email. The following texts entertain unexplored possibilities of these technologies. In Love. in Cyberia, Justine travels back in time to the 1960s and comes to experience the period in which her parents were her age and dating. However, in Terminal Chic she travels forward in time to the fourth millennium and explores a new dimension, which has a different depth, shape, and substance. Both the retro space of the ’60s and the futuristic cyberspace are alien territories for her in terms of their social practices, architecture, fashion, technology, and language. However, it is her experience of the fourth millennium that brings a more acute sense of estrangement and ontological disruption. This text in particular expresses a reaction to posthuman and antihumanist culture and sentiments that were being felt due to technology’s pervasive infiltration of everyday life towards the end of the second millennium. The two books together provide an interesting juxtaposition between the innocent, ‘pre-technological world’ (Rayban, 1996, p. 129) of the 1960s and the sophisticated, high-tech world of the fourth millennium in terms of sexuality, women’s domestic labour, and other aspects of culture. For instance, in Love. in Cyberia, after Justine takes up a position as an au pair so she can live with her grandparents and future mother, she laments the ‘inconvenience of living in a pre-technological age’. And her unpoliticised post-feminist attitude causes her to remark seemingly without irony: ‘I was rapidly coming to a conclusion. It wasn’t the feminists who had liberated modern woman, it was the engineers’ (p. 129). By contrast, life in the fourth millennium assumes a kind of technological hegemony in that all aspects of living are governed by sophisticated technology – security, domestic appliances, procreation, and ageing (which is arrested). In Terminal Chic, Justine becomes ‘wired’ in that she is neurologically modified to experience the new electronically mediated world like everyone else. She is able to calculate complicated maths in her head without delay, she can summon up email and respond visually and verbally to messages, and she is now able to be tracked by the authorities. Being wired also means having the capacity to virtually ‘connect’ sexually to another person. As Los coyly explains it to Justine: ‘Wired’s like “on-line”. And connecting, erm, I think your time, you used to call it “shagging”’ (59). The cyberspace of Terminal Chic has a different spatio-temporality to Earth and represents a new urban sector where advanced technologies appear to enhance and augment the more prosaic aspects of life into a postmodernism-meets-sci-fi future: people move along


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a transparent conveyor called a ‘transporflor’, advertising holograms come to life and speak to passers-by, and a ‘simulator’ provides food of your choice after accepting your eye-print as a means of authentication. The urban cyberspace is the realisation of postmodern art in its minimalism, chrome and plexiglass, transparent surfaces and planes. It also embodies a postmodern sensibilitity in its lack of history (there are no monuments and very little history is taught in schools). Despite its technological sophistication, the new cyberspace carries a legacy of marginalisation and discrimination. The Upsiders (the perfect ones who enjoy all that technology can offer) and the Downsiders (those imperfect ones who are destined for a squalid and archaic-technological existence) are banned from mixing. That such discrimination and inequality can persist when the world has supposedly moved to a higher level of civilisation and sophistication reflects Rosi Braidotti’s (1996) observation that a paradox underpins postmodernity: despite the commodification and conformism of cultures, the disparities and structural inequalities within and between sub/cultures are intensified. Like some of the best sci-fi movies (The Matrix, Blade Runner), the urban space of Terminal Chic is a good example of hyperreality and Baudrillard’s ‘loss of the real’ has significance in that reality and fantasy are collapsed into virtual reality. This is manifested in the narrative world of the fourth millennium in numerous ways. When Justine first arrives in Los’s future time-space world, he takes her to dinner in a restaurant where food and ambience can be summoned by naming what one desires. When Los suggests a bit of atmosphere a rose appears in a single stem vase, but when Justine reaches out to touch it she discovers it is a hologram (p. 53). This more-real-than-real space plays with anamorphosis in that what one sees, or more correctly doesn’t see, materialises on command. In this space, seeing is not privileged over touch and sound. While vision may no longer assume predominance over other senses in terms of a hierarchy of bodily perception, this shift from vision offers an opportunity to explore other senses as a way out of the tyranny of the gaze (Braidotti). The following sections examine whether Terminal Chic and the other texts realise this opportunity.

Cyberbodies and transgendered performance But what does the cyberbody phenomenon in these texts mean for gender and sexuality from a feminist perspective? Rayban’s texts hover between liberal feminism’s battle of the sexes and a popular postfeminist go-girl proclamation. In this way, they are emblematic of the

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confusions, paradoxes, and contestations that continue to surround feminism/post-feminism. Despite Justine’s desire to be agentive, she persistently relies on more skilful, rational, male friends to help her make decisions. She also categorises masculine and feminine behaviours as fixed and natural attributes, even after she is turned into a boy at the VR booth in Virtual Sexual Reality. This transformation into a masculine subject works to reinforce her ideas of gender as a binary system with different sets of essential characteristics. But for readers it might offer other possibilities for thinking about the discursive construction of a primal identity. For example, Butler’s discussion about the ‘boying of the boy’ and the ‘girling of the girl’ (1993, pp. 7–8) offers a useful example. One of the aspects of post-feminism that is evident in the texts is how Justine’s experiences of herself as a young woman have a material and affective basis. For instance, she embraces a girlie-styled femininity (she talks of the joys of shopping, clothing, and values good looks) and the idea of romance with its enduring promise of quest and conquest. In addition to the culturally based affects that come from indulging in materiality, Justine is active in pursuing her desires for libidinal affects and pleasures. Across the three books, a persistent theme is that Justine is always in love and in hot pursuit of the male object of her desire. In Virtual Sexual Reality, she is in love with Alex, but in Love. in Cyberia and Terminal Chic, Los, the time traveller, is the new romantic interest. Clearly, it is Los’s physical attractiveness that is the main drawcard, as the reader is constantly told about how ‘gorgeous’ he is (Justine spares no hyperbole in describing Los’s eyes, hair, skin, teeth, lips, body). Ironically, while Justine continues to employ sight as the point of connection to the object of her desire, Los is less interested in the body as the site/sight of desire. At one point, Justine notices how Los seems to be oblivious to the passing parade of perfect female bodies: ‘He swept past them as if he were immune.… But Los didn’t even seem to register their presence’ (2000, p. 45). From a (Second Wave) feminist critique, Justine’s desires and practices can be understood as reiterating a masculinist perception that the feminine subject is ruled by emotion rather than reason. Justine’s firstperson focalised account of her experiences and thoughts works to position the ideal female reader into an intimate circle of female knowledge about males – their desirability, their behaviours, their ‘essential’ qualities. This is also a feature of many post-feminist texts (for example, Sex and the City). The problem with this textual strategy from a theoretical perspective is that ‘women’ and ‘men’ become signifiers whose meanings are assured or become words whose referents are ‘given’ in the material


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world. Post-feminist perspectives from both academe and the media complicate this simple reductive argument. Whereas a media-promoted post-feminism paradoxically advocates both individualism and sisterhood, an academic interpretation might both recognise the position from which one might speak as a ‘woman’ and acknowledge that the concept of woman is multiple and complex (Kennedy, 2000, p. 21). Justine’s character reiterates a set of gender performatives which are necessary in order for her to be recognisable or intelligible as ‘female’. Before discussing how the texts attempt to subvert gender performativity through virtual transformation and transgendering, I want to consider for the present the connections between gender performativity and the material body in Los’s world. In Los’s world in the fourth millennium (Terminal Chic), all Upsiders have perfect bodies, a fact which erases any hierarchy of cyberbody beauty. It is indeed a world of cyberbabes and cyberhunks. In this posthuman world, perfect bodies are made because a massive gene pool is the means for insemination, doing away with the need for a single male father. Thus, the embodied self is brought to the highest stage of physical accomplishment. But the hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity that characterise the Upsiders, only serve to intensify the imperfection of the Downsiders, who are marginalised, harassed, and reviled because they do not embody a subjectivity that is valorised. The perfection of the Upsiders causes Justine to ask: ‘This couldn’t simply be nature at work, could it?’ (p. 42). This comment alerts us to how technobiology has undermined the difference between artificial and natural, and how perception of our own bodies and our attitude towards the body of another person is focused on the surface. In the readers’ worlds, this utopian view of perfection accompanies dystopian fears of genetic engineering, the rise of a ‘super class’ (Ostry, 2004, p. 228),2 which recalls Hitler’s vision for a super race. When Justine arrives in cyberspace, her body is transformed by a skintight outfit which gives her 38D breasts and a superslim appearance, much to her delight (a Dolly Parton cyborg comes to mind). However, Los is taken aback by her new appearance and when Justine notices how much everyone is looking at her, he tells her it is because she looks like ‘A simchick. A droid – not real’ (p. 46). He euphemistically informs her that she is a ‘street entertainer’, in other words, a prostitute. It is ironic that as Justine’s body takes on cyberbabe proportions, she becomes a commodity (a simchick) and as such she is perceived in terms of inequality and exclusion. Los’s mother takes one look at her and demands that she leave the house and not return. Consequently, the ironic twist

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is that in achieving a hyperfeminised body or over-embodiment there is a loss of subjectivity and agency, and a confinement to a particular gendered and sexual identity that has a limited currency. The artificiality of Justine’s body renders her ‘not real’, yet it is still understood and read through a social discourse that brings certain values and knowledge about simchicks. Thus, the body remains the site of cultural interpretations and in existentialist terms ‘“existing” one’s body becomes a personal way of having to take up and interpret that set of received gender norms’ (Butler, 1986, p. 45). Furthermore, this narrative event is paradigmatic of society’s power to subjectify the individual through interpellation. However, the interpellation both succeeds and fails: Justine refuses to be constituted as a simchick but the ‘hailing’ becomes the condition of possibility for constituting herself (Butler, 1993, p. 197). When she decides to return home, her simchick body is removed freeing her ‘real’ body: ‘With a kind of ooze of relief my body slid back into its original shape’ (2000, p. 165). The struggle over representation and recognition experienced by Justine in Terminal Chic is also evident in Virtual Sexual Reality. In this text, the struggle is narrativised through a temporary process of transgendering, offering us insights into the social construction of identity. Butler argues that drag can constitute a disruptive repetition of gender norms by foregrounding the arbitrary relation between sex and gender and juxtaposing a recognisable performance of femininity against the background of a culturally intelligible male body. To read transgendered performance in this text through Butler’s notion of parody and drag is to see how readers are positioned to see Justine ‘perform’ gender (male and female) and how these heterosexual identities are given a truth value that posits them as ‘essential’ and ‘natural’. But the process becomes complicated when we consider how the body expresses existential themes. While Justine learns to talk, walk, act and relate to others as a straight male ( Jake), she finds that her body and mind behave differently just by the mere fact of the physical transformation. She asserts: What I soon discovered is that we [males and females] are utterly – I mean utterly and totally – different. For a start, imagine what it’s like suddenly to gain four stone – just like that – most of it, I’m glad to say, in solid muscle. Striding out of Olympia, I felt like a cross between Superman and the Jolly Green Giant. But what was most amazing was that the world looked different … Something most peculiar seemed to have happened to my eyesight.


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I found myself automatically picking out all the different makes of cars that passed – and even the motorbikes. All of a sudden I could tell a Yamaha from a Suzuki. (1994, p. 21) If we are only what we ‘do’ and, as Butler claims, there is no doer behind the deed, then who or what is it that makes the choice for actions? This question is one that is implicit in the excerpt above. The story is clearly a lesson in the trials and tribulations of gender expectations and its social construction, but it also offers us a means for a more existentialist enquiry into consciousness. In illustrating the ways in which males and females are burdened by these socially constraining practices, it nevertheless offers a more profound transformation than some other crossdressing novels for children. Stephens’s comment on this text implies that the transformation is merely another comedic drag performance: ‘Ultimately, the cybernetic possibility has proved to be a useful plot device, but is unable to tell readers more about gender than can be told by a female-to-male cross-dressing narrative closing with comparable reincorporation’ (2006, p. 12). While temporary gender transformation provides a parodic strategy for the narrative to explore the battle-ofthe-sexes theme it sets up, it may not necessarily fail to the extent that Stephens suggests. I think that the political possibility of this text lies in the ambiguities that Justine/Jake experiences with respect to the intertwinings among consciousness and body, seeing and speaking, self and world. Justine not only turns into Jake, but her ‘original’ self also coexists with her ‘second’ self. Justine may look like Jake (a gorgeous masculine version of her feminine self), but she thinks and acts like both Justine and Jake. This melding of mind/body is the source for what Justine/Jake sees as potentially embarrassing romantic entanglements with dual selves. A further complication to a potentially bizarre ménage-à-trois is when Alex (Justine’s original object of desire) sees Jake as a buddy and wants to hang out with him as a mate. The following passage focalised through Justine (in Jake’s body) illustrates an embodied consciousness: Here we were ALONE TOGETHER, for the very FIRST TIME in our LIVES. The LIGHTS were LOW, the SOFA BECKONED and there was a really scary movie on hand to provide a legitimate excuse for sitting SEDUCTIVELY CLOSE. But just when it mattered most my sexual status put the whole thing on ICE. Oh how could life be SOO-OO … UNFAIR? (p. 137)

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While one aspect of Justine’s subjectivity looks and acts like Jake, she also engages in a self-reflexive accounting of the differences between male and female, and compares how gender requires different practices in order to be recognisable and intelligible. One way of explaining how sex and gender are represented in this text in a one-to-one relation to one another is that the constant staging of the performative acts occurs within a ‘real’ physical location, and not in cyberspace, a space where Stone (1995, p. 180) notes, ‘the transgendered body is the natural body’. While virtual environments make it possible for individuals to separate their public (visible) personae from the physical materiality of their bodies, Justine finds that without the cover of anonymity an Internet persona can provide, she needs to visibly imitate a masculine identity in order to pass as Jake. Her friend and confidant, Chuck, instructs her on appropriate ways of being male: ‘You’ll drink lager OK? Sol or Grolsch or something’ … ‘And for godsake don’t ask for a glass! Stick with me and stand at the bar and please – if you must sit down, try not to sit like that or you’ll ruin my cred.’ (p. 34) Consequently, despite the transgendered embodiment that Justine experiences, the text maps a series of normative gender and sexual behaviours onto her physical body. Unlike a similar play with identity in a virtual environment, Justine is aware that her border-crossing behaviours have consequences in the real world, especially when it comes to acting upon the bizarre situation when the ‘real’ embodiment of Justine falls for the hybrid Jake/Justine as illustrated above. Justine’s different modes of being provide her with renewed understandings of her multiple selves as physical, cognitive, and emotional. Ultimately, she makes the decision to get rid of Jake by returning to the VR booth and reversing the process. It would seem that in answer to the questions of who makes the choice and why, we are caught between a humanistic account of the individual who has freedom to make a choice and a deterministic constructionism that sees agency is only possible after the fact of action. These three texts represent only tentative moves towards sexual expression (despite the panting of desire, Justine and Los never do more than just kiss). They are also tentative about exploring the possibilities that a transition from a human(ist) to a posthuman world offers. This is part of the inherent paradox of cybercultural phenomena mentioned


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previously. On the one hand, technology and cyberspace offer the possibility for multiple and polymorphous re-embodiments through the decentring of the subject and the flexible relationship between the self and its body. On the other, there is a sense of nostalgia for what is lost, particularly the decline of classical humanism. In YA novels, such as these by Rayban, there is a sense of excitement in these brave new worlds where technology is seen as transforming not only the functional aspects of the characters’ lives, but also their ontological realities, especially in terms of emotional relationships. Nevertheless, nostalgia also pervades these narratives. In Virtual Sexual Reality, Justine/Jake longs to be just Justine again, and abandon the simulacrum that she created of her masculine identity. In Love. in Cyberia, Justine’s travelling in time back to the 1960s revisits for some adult readers a period that is marketed in nostalgic terms with its alternative lifestyles, sexual freedoms, and social revolutions. But it is in Terminal Chic that the most blatant and repeated desire for nostalgia occurs. Justine assesses the new world of the fourth millennium as lacking in so many ways: ‘There’s nothing left. No bars, no cafes, no clubs. Nothing’ (p. 149). But it is the nostalgia for home that engulfs her. Despite her previous state of unhappiness and longing to be with Los in his time-space dimension, Justine comes to long for what she has left behind: ‘Normally, on a Saturday night, home was the very last place I’d want to be. But the thought of it not being there brought on a massive attack of nostalgia’ (p. 149). Apart from the material comparisons between her time and Los’s, it is the inability of individuals in the fourth millennium to love that is the most disappointing for her. When Justine declares to Los her love for him, he is disbelieving and explains that in Upside not only do they not believe in love anymore, but it is banned (p. 131). While Los tries to explain that love doesn’t exist and science has shown it is only an ‘electrical activity in the brain’, Justine declares with impassioned fervour that love is ‘real! It’s more real than anything!’ (p. 132). But the words ‘I love you’ which carry emotional weight in Justine’s world are denied privilege and the support of authority in Los’s world. So the novel comes to a crisis point – not simply to love or not to love, but a point which takes us back to my beginning about the erotics of communication. Up until this point, the kiss was the closest erotic moment that Justine and Los shared in the flesh. But while it had its effects, at least for Justine, its lasting potency was nothing compared to the erotic sensation email held for both Justine and Los. It was Los’s romantic prose (or sentimental twaddle) that inspired Justine’s fantasy of a search

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for love in cyberspace and which impelled her to travel to the next millennium to be with him: A billion billion stars Shine in my heart While a billion billion hours Keep us apart (p. 85) Ironically, then, disembodiment through email brought more pleasure than embodiment. This experience resonates with how the disembodied pleasures of computer-mediated entertainments have quickened our sense of sexual possibility with the absence of the body. In these texts, proximity does not ensure sexual relations. We are told that wired or online sex is how it is done in Los’s world, thus allowing readers to imagine (or recall) along with Justine the disembodied alternatives to embodied consummation: ‘Could one virtually “do it”? Or didn’t that count, like being a “technical virgin”?’ (p. 95). Such a question raises the possibility of transcending the body and how (virtual) sexual interactions could theoretically be free of physical consequences.

Not over her dead body or a case of mind over matter In this section I turn to the matter of the posthuman in The Host (2008), a novel by Stephanie Meyer whose ‘Twilight’ vampire series has become highly popular with young adults. I continue to explore how notions of dis/embodiment, self and subjectivity as mind in/out of bodies are treated in fictional texts. However, in its narrative journey into what it means to be human or posthuman, The Host also opens up other issues that inevitably arise from an enquiry into the different discursive contexts within which a subject must operate. Some of these issues concern hierarchies of power and privilege, and how they permit structures and practices of regulation and control over a subject’s right to live freely and safely. These politics shape relations between individuals and between individuals and communities. Another issue is located in existential accounts of the self as consciousness or identity (Dennett, 1981). This philosophical issue provides an entrée to my discussion. In Daniel Dennett’s short story ‘Where am I?’ published in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), Dennett offers a thought experiment via a fictional account of how he underwent surgery to have his brain removed from his body. The motivation for


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the operation, so the story goes, was so he could undertake a serious mission on behalf of the Pentagon to recover a radioactive device that only affected the brain and no other bodily organ or tissues. The idea of brain transplantation as a topic in fiction is not new and is revisited in The Host (2008).3 Dennett’s story provides an interesting pretext to Meyer’s narrative, and the two texts raise similar, intriguing, moral and ontological dilemmas about identity. The question that Dennett ponders – ‘where am I?’ – considers physical displacement and distance when his brain (Yorick) resides in a vat while his body (Hamlet) exists elsewhere. A similar question occurs in The Host when a soul is implanted into Melanie Stryder’s newly healed body (she had thrown herself down an elevator shaft to avoid capture by the Seekers). However, in both stories the question is not just about physical location as it is also about the presence of ‘I’. In The Host, the narrative often falls victim to its own cleverness as it slips at times into a Cartesian conception of the subject as a split body/mind. These slippages provide interesting moments for the readers who need to follow the shifting ‘I’ when focalisation moves between a language of interiority (‘I think’) to a language of performativity (‘I do’). In considering the causal relation between the body and the mind, Dennett ponders if the ‘I’ is in Hamlet (the body) or ‘where a person is … is not necessarily where his brain, the physical seat of his soul, resides’ (p. 313). This dualistic position is then refuted when he considers that ‘I’ is where his brain is even if it is transferred to another body. It is this latter proposition that Meyer’s text deconstructs. In The Host, souls are inserted into the bodies of humans who act as their hosts. The soul is ‘the unseen force that guides the body’ (p. 13). However, Dennett’s initial point – that the ‘person’ is not necessarily where the brain/soul resides – is the mind–body problem that drives Meyer’s narrative. Readers are told early in the story that only occasionally are human hosts so strong that souls are unable to suppress the minds of their hosts. In these instances, the souls take on the personality of the body, rather than the other way around. When this reversal of the normal course of events occurs, the soul has no other option but to abandon its host and be inserted into a different, more compliant body. This foreshadows a kind of humanist posthumanism which argues that no matter the degree to which humans can be transformed (or invaded), the human condition will prevail. And the body remains a source of identity. The fact that Melanie is a resistant host provides, at the narrative level, the implications of what can happen when an implanted soul invades/inhabits a body that is not passive. At a theoretical level, her

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resistance undermines the behaviourist conception of ‘conditioning’ and the assumed passivity of the body. The Host raises familiar contestations and tensions around gender that previous chapters have considered. These concern how norms and conventions permit and restrict certain forms of existence. The complex discourses of signification for cultural (and historical) ways of being male or female become clearly apparent, despite the text’s futuristic setting. Melanie is a product of our world (Earth) and as such she is historically and culturally situated in a society that is divided and organised in terms of biological sex and associated gendered practices and behaviours. Her new soul, however, has lived in many hosts (human, plant, animal), in many different time periods, and in many different planets, a total of nine lives. The soul is described as a sexless, three-inch long, worm-like species. After the male Healer inserts the soul into Melanie’s body, he gives her a new name: ‘Yes, Wanderer will suit her well until she chooses a new name for herself’ (p. 14). Melanie is now a host and like other hosts she is recognisable as such by her reflective eyes. When Melanie’s Uncle Jeb finds Wanderer close to death in the desert after her failed attempt to find Melanie’s brother Jamie and boyfriend Jared, he takes her to a human community, which lives in hiding in underground caves in the Arizona desert. The community is very much a patriarchal one ruled by the kindly but astute Jeb. Jeb renames Wanderer, ‘Wanda’, a symbolic act which connotes a christening into a new life; it also asserts his control as the one who has the right to rename another. Jeb is the law in this community and his rifle is his (phallic) symbol of power and rule. As he is the founder of the caves and the one who built the first home within them, he is himself a (human) host. He often reminds the others that they are his ‘guests’ who live inside his subterranean home by his rules: ‘You’re guests here, boys, and don’t forget it,’ Jeb growled. ‘I told you not to go looking for the girl. She’s my guest, too, for the moment, and I don’t take kindly to any of my guests killing any of the others.’ (p. 145) His position of authority/host has parallels with Melanie’s experience as host to Wanda; however, unlike Jeb’s agential subjectivity, Melanie and Wanda’s symbiotic relationship as host-soul offers limited agency (in the early stages of the story) for enacting on their individual desires and developing subjectivity both within the body and within the community.


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Wanda embodies a double paradox of being: first, Jeb confers on her ‘guest’ membership to the community whereby she is under his ‘natural’ authority as patriarchal head of the community; and second, she is both Wanderer and Melanie, and Wanda. This situation is similar to Dennett’s multiple embodiments and disembodiments with regards to Yorick (mind), Hamlet (body) and Dennett (the omniscient narrator and focaliser). At a superficial level, embodiment in both Dennett’s story and Meyer’s appears to be tied to an individual’s occupation of space: the spatial confines of the human body, and the spatial confines of the caves (Meyer) or the vat in the laboratory (Dennett). At a more philosophical and perhaps humanist level, embodiment entails a subject’s beliefs, knowledge, performative acts and utterances, and the entire context in which he/she exists. These embodied aspects of subjectivity and existence (existenz) become apparent from the early stages after implantation when Wanderer finds that Melanie’s memories direct her desires to a point where ‘she’ (Dennett’s ‘I’) is both soul and body (Wanderer and Melanie) and the distinction between the two seems (im)material: ‘I could not separate myself from this body’s wants. It was me, more than I’d ever intended it to be. Did I want or did it want? Did that distinction even matter now?’ (p. 89). However, towards the close of the story, Wanda has gained subjectivity and agency in that she is now recognised by others as a significant member of the community, a go-between who can negotiate both human and posthuman existence. The body/soul difference she embodies appears to no longer be a cause for the community’s distrust and rejection of her. One of the significant ways in which Wanda’s subjectivity is achieved within the community depends on the limits to which other members can empathise with, and gain an understanding of, the specific contexts and details of her existence as someone who is different. In particular, the question that underpins the motivations and actions of the characters is: what counts or matters as human? In other words, to be human is the yardstick for measuring worth, and all other forms of existence are measured according to their proximity to the human condition. Wanda challenges the community’s conception of the distinction between active (human) subject and abject (posthuman) object. The question of what counts as human is central to the ideas that Haraway’s (2000) ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ raises, particularly her focus on the ways in which technoscience is constantly producing new hybrid objects and subjects. These developments (e.g. transgenic mouse, genome map) challenge us to consider what exactly separates humans from posthumans.

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The dominant males in the community (except Jeb) refer to Wanda by the non-gendered pronoun ‘it’. The narrative’s humanist perspective positions us to see this persistent denial of Wanda (as human and female) as an act of marginalisation. In the following exchange Wanda lashes out against her abjection and the loss of subjectivity, and articulates her desire to be recognised as female: ‘I am female,’ I complained. ‘That “it” business is really getting on my nerves.’ Jared blinked in surprise. Then his face settled back into harder lines. ‘Because of the body you wear?’ Wes glared at him. ‘Because of me,’ I hissed. ‘By whose definition?’ ‘How about by yours? In my species, I am the one that bears young. Is that not female enough for you?’ That stopped him short. I felt almost smug. As you should, Melanie approved. He’s wrong, and he’s being a pig about it. Thank you. We girls have to stick together. (p. 347, emphasis in original) Theorising this exchange from different feminist perspectives brings further dilemmas. From a liberal feminist perspective, in claiming her sexual difference through language Wanda asserts her presence as female – ‘I am female’. From a perspective that draws on Judith Butler’s slightly altered Foucauldian approach, language (both Wanda’s gendered language and the men’s use of ‘it’) is a form of regulatory power that produces the subject it seeks to control (Butler, 1993, p. 22). Wanda’s recourse to her reproductive ability as the defining element of what it means to be female relies on ‘the sexed specificity of the female body’ (Butler, 1993, p. 28). The implied privileging of a heterosexual-reproductive coupling is at odds with a more feminist-posthumanist discourse that she later calls upon in explaining to Jared that while ‘Motherhood is all but worshipped among my kind’ (p. 479), reproduction is achieved without heterosexual intercourse. The assertive and annoyed tone is also out of character for Wanda. While Melanie is a more assertive even aggressive personality than the soul, Wanda is usually able to control Melanie’s words from being spoken aloud. But these words cited in the extract above are not Melanie’s (except for the approving comment) and


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therefore the words uncharacteristically assert Melanie’s point of view rather than Wanda’s. While the final post/feminist comment – ‘We girls have to stick together’ – is tinged with irony given their singly embodied situation, it nevertheless tends to trivialise any feminist agenda that might have prompted the initial reference to language. These competing readings that I offer here highlight the problems that sexual/gender difference poses with respect to the intersections of the biological, the discursive, the social, the psychic, and the semiotic. One of the enduring features of human politics is the capacity to ‘domesticate and hierarchize difference’ according to race, class, and gender (Halberstam & Livingstone 1995, p. 10). A hierarchy of difference based on gender is recognised in the social order(ing) of the underground human community. The women who live in the caves are mostly silent, background figures who have little say in the running of the community, despite their significant input to the daily grind of cleaning, cooking, growing and harvesting food. The men too contribute to the common good, but they alone are the ones who go on raids to nearby towns in order to steal supplies for the community, and therefore have a higher status as breadwinners. The men also dominate the ‘tribunals’ (over which Jeb presides) when the community needs to make decisions on a course of punishment for an individual’s aberrant behaviour. This separation of masculinity and femininity into recognisably sex-appropriate behaviours manifests historically based and culturally constructed notions about male and female bodies. That no one questions the social order suggests that it is accepted as natural. A further aspect of the social order is the way in which violence is managed and sanctioned. Initially, we witness how Jared, Kyle, and Ian are hostile to Wanda, who suffers from their violent actions towards her: she is battered and bruised and the side of her face becomes scarred from repeated blows. The norms established in the community that govern gendered behaviour and precipitate acts of violence by the men can be understood in a broader societal context through Butler’s point that ‘norms seem to signal the regulatory or normalizing function of power’ (2002, p. 219). The community is bound by a sense of what members have as ‘common’ among them, namely, their humanness and their determination to survive. But as Butler argues: ‘we see the “norm” as that which binds us, but we also see that the “norm” creates unity only through a strategy of exclusion’ (2002, p. 206). In this story, Wanda’s posthuman state means that she does not fit the ‘norm’ (that governs gender and what counts as human) and therefore she is excluded. Despite her guest status, Wanda is unable to enjoy a ‘livable

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existence’ (p. 206) within the community. Consequently, she is both outside the norm of the community and abject. The implanting of a soul in a human body is reasoned by the posthuman species that now dominate Earth as the only way in which the violent human race can be changed into a more productive and peaceful citizenry. However, the most vividly violent action that characterises the discourse of difference in the text is done by Doc, the only medical person in the community, when he dissects (slaughters) the living souls in the interest of research. Readers are able to experience the horror of this scene through Wanda’s eyes and her humanised account: Shimmering segments of silver stretched in twisted, tortured pieces across the table … tiny silver strands plucked and naked and scattered … splatters of silver liquid smeared on the table, the blankets, the walls. (p. 408) I had clearly seen the vestigial feelers still attached to the truncated anterior section of a child. Just a child! A baby! A baby thrown haphazardly in maimed pieces across the table smeared with its own blood. (p. 409) Doc and his assistants had covered the human corpses with sheets, but in not covering the slaughtered souls, they failed to recognise their materiality. In describing two acts of violence – the (pain-free but nevertheless enforced) colonisation of human bodies and the slaughter of souls by humans for scientific research and knowledge – the narrative gives two accounts of difference. The first is justified within a posthuman framework that considers the possibilities for new relationships between human and non-human; the second considers no such relationship. But in acting according to their function to ‘absolutize difference’, the humans in this narrative demonstrate their inability to consider the souls as matter-that-counts; this inability can also be understood in terms of ‘the limits of what is knowable’ (Butler, 2002, p. 215). The limit of human knowledge in this narrative instance is defined by what is acceptable according to the group’s available ontology. The scene of slaughter is a recurring motif in sci-fi texts, where violent demise of the alien other occurs due to an alien nature being unacceptable to humans (see, for example, the Alien films). However,


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the slaughtering of the souls and the colonisation of the human bodies can be seen as two versions of the same Cartesian battle between control and threat. As Wanda gradually gains acceptance by the community she also becomes more human, she describes her transitionality in terms of being: ‘a very confused soul with human emotions that were too powerful to control’ (p. 421). Thus, as difference becomes more like sameness, Wanda becomes more like the others with their human emotions, especially the human capacity to love another. The final erasure of difference is when Wanda’s soul is reinserted in another host body so that Melanie can be reunited with Jared, and Wanda (now ‘Pet’) can become Ian’s partner, a prospect which, she says: ‘made me feel human’ (p. 613), and thus completes the transition.

Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? Wanda’s transition from abjection to subjective agency is presented in the narrative as a double-edged victory. When Wanda makes the decision that by her death others can live and love, her desire for death is the ultimate sacrifice. While the narrative positions readers to see Wanda’s actions this way, after all we are told several times she is self-sacrificing, we can, however, think about this action in a way that complicates the trope of the self-sacrificing, maternal-feminine subject. This complication hinges on desire, which we can explore in relation to Wanda’s queerness and Butler’s notion of the phallus as ‘a transferable phantasm’ (2003, p. 86). Wanda’s double embodiment or multiple selves troubles gender and sexual identity, and calls into question fixed notions of biological difference and any humanist notions of a coherent subject. It also can be seen in terms of the philosophical challenge of authenticity that we saw occurring in Rayban’s texts. Wanda’s queerness manifests in how she inhabits Melanie’s body and desires (including sexual passion for Jared and familial love for Jamie): a queer posthuman subject that, through processes of appropriation and interpellation, becomes female. These processes function to compel Wanda to cite both sexual and gendered norms in order to qualify for subjecthood within the heterosexual matrix of the community that ‘hails’ her. However, Wanda’s queerness is not so much because of the soul’s previous sexless state that now inhabits a female body (that she comes to love), but perhaps more to do with my proposition that the soul becomes a symbol of the phallus. This proposition has credence if we consider Butler’s deprivileging of

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the phallus within a heterosexual form of exchange, to reprivileging it between women (2003, p. 88). Butler’s view is that the phallus is not a privileged bodily signifier for the penis, but a symbol that may be redeployed by those who do not have penises (lesbian or not). In accordance with Butler’s prospect of the phallus as symbolised by other body parts – arm, tongue, hand, knee, and so on – then it is reasonable that the ‘soul’ in the context of this narrative could also be a symbol of the phallus. In this narrative, the soul lives within a woman’s body and becomes identified with her body. This situation displaces the symbolic heterosexual hegemony of sexual difference with a same-sex dyadic relationship, and opens up an alternative imaginary schema of ‘erotogenic pleasure’ (Butler, 1993, p. 91). If we understand ‘queer’ in Sedgwick’s terms (1990) as indistinguishable, undefinable, and mobile, Wanda’s queer subjectivity enables her not only to hold the power of the phallus but to enjoy erotogenic pleasures with Jared. When Wanda and Jared eventually engage in moments of passion, Wanda describes its explosive volatility as ‘a spark to gasoline’ (p. 389). But Melanie reacts against their passion so vehemently that she makes the body act as an independent entity striking out and hitting Jared in the jaw. How do we read this violent reaction? As an indication of heterosexual jealousy or as a disavowal of same-sex desire? Both are possible and the narrative plays with the ambiguity. After all, Wanda is an embodied presence whereas Melanie is, paradoxically, an embodied absence. To borrow Butler’s reasoning, this triadic relationship can be explained as: ‘the third [in this instance Jared] is both inside the relationship [between Melanie and Wanda], as a constituting passion, and “outside” as the partially unrealised and prohibited object of desire’ (Butler, 2002, p. 140). Therefore, in order to be free of this triadic relationship, Wanda decides to exit the body so that Jared and Melanie can satisfy their desire for one another. The text plays with this ‘to stay or not to stay’ dilemma by offering a chapter titled ‘Finished’. Wanda sacrifices herself for Melanie and the two bid their heartfelt farewells. The end. The Host, however, delays closure, by following this chapter with four blank pages (intended to heighten readers’ curiosity for more) and then a coda that explains that the humans decided not to honour Wanda’s wishes to die and be buried in the community’s cemetery. Instead, they found another host for Wanda to inhabit and, using the skills that Wanda had taught Doc, a successful implant surgery was performed on her. Does this final gesture indicate that the phallus remains a privileged (masculine) signifier after all? By


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not abiding by Wanda’s wishes Doc performs a life-taking/life-saving god-trick using the technological knowledge that Wanda has given him. In deciding to keep Wanda alive and by choosing a body as her new host that is young, pretty, and weak, the humans create ‘Pet’ as an object of their own desires: a name that suggests her subordinate status with respect to the humans. Pet is both sexualised and dependent with limited agency and physical strength, and is frustrated that she is now separated from her previous body which was more powerful than the new one: ‘It was bad enough that my new body was weak and nearly useless in the caves; I couldn’t believe it when the others didn’t want to let me use my body for the one thing it was perfect for [going on raids]’ (p. 613). Consequently, the regulatory power once again produces the subject it controls and the phallus remains a symbol that can be redeployed, but not necessarily among women. An alternative reading is to see Pet’s arrival as another origin story in the Western humanist sense: a story that ‘depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss, and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate’ (Haraway, 2000, p. 51). The separation of Wanda and Melanie (which one is the mother?) and Wanda’s insertion into Pet’s body is a double move of separation from, and a recuperation of, the phallic mother so that a new beginning can occur. Further weight is given to the proposition of an origin story as the soul (Wanda) tells Doc that she comes from a place called ‘The Origin’, and: ‘It’s where I was … born’ (p. 249). If my reading has validity then the world of the text continues to be one that cannot be imagined without gender, despite its posthuman inhabitants. As Haraway notes, ‘a world without gender … is perhaps a world without genesis’ (p. 51). The interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that was evident in my reading of the three novels by Rayban and The Host is already becoming obsolete in its focus on the tensions between these two positions. According to Hayles (2005, p. 2), interest now lies in how different versions of the posthuman evolve in conjunction with intelligent machines. Up to this point, I have explored how the binary of embodiment and disembodiment was perpetuated in the YA texts as a feature of liberal (post)humanism. The conundrum as to where the self is located, whether in the mind or in the body, was explored in The Host where Melanie’s body refused to be a mere container for the mind/soul. I now turn to a direction offered by Katherine Hayles that considers posthumanism as not doing away with bodies (embodiment), but with ‘extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and

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material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis’ (1999, p. 291). Jaspers’s notion of existenz can continue to be reappropriated as we consider Hayles’s posthumanism and think about what it means to be ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’ (in a post-Cartesian sense) as an embodied being-in-the-world. Research into cybernetics, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, artificial life, and virtual reality has been ‘extending embodied awareness’ for some time and continues to offer new and exciting developments, ushering in what some researchers would see as a ‘new post-biological age’ (Bell, 2001, p. 144).4 This development is not necessarily at odds with contemporary existentialist thinking. Indeed, Butler speaks of ‘“existing” one’s body’, by having to take up and interpret received gender norms (1986, p. 45).

Beyond bodily limits: Superheroes, cyborgs, and gender/race politics In the following discussion, I further explore how literature and film produced for young people offer avenues for us to consider these evolving hybrid subjectivities. My interest here lies in examining what the enhanced capacities (‘super powers’) and the side-effects of melding bodies and machines entail for the posthuman, particularly with respect to gender. The texts I discuss – Hero (Moore, 2007), Sky High (2005), and Sailor Moon (1998–2001) – all reference the cyborg intertext in varying ways.5 Despite Haraway’s declaration that ‘the cyborg is a creature in a postgender world: it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness’ (2000, p. 51), the texts I discuss here still cling to a gender hierarchy and binary, despite the cyborg presence. Consequently, Haraway’s ‘infidel heteroglossia’ (p. 57) remains elusive as these texts persist with dualisms, categories, and identities that characterise human dominations (hierarchies) based on gender, class, and race. Perhaps the texts’ inability to consider a way out of the binaries and hierarchies can be understood in terms of Gill Kirkup’s comment that while the cyborg has provided a useful means for deconstructing gender its ‘usefulness as a tool for material change is yet to be proved’ (2000, p. 5). Children’s and YA literature open up ways of looking at reality by re-presenting the world through a range of mimic devices in order to ensure a sense of verisimilitude. Consequently, the focus texts in this discussion draw on familiar contexts such as going to school, living within a family, dealing with bullies, developing inter/subjectivity, and


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so forth in an attempt to represent and interrogate what can be seen as often prosaic social practices and difficult processes of identity formation and socialisation. However, in turning the prosaic aspects of everyday life into something extraordinary by having characters with superhuman powers, the texts provide readers with possibilities for reconsidering the taken-for-grantedness of human experience and the potential that a posthuman existence offers. The posthuman subjects in these narratives can be seen in terms of Haraway’s figure of the cyborg as simultaneously a hope (‘our best machines are made of sunshine’) and a danger (‘a matter of immense human pain’) (2000, p. 53). While cyberfiction often deals with the motif of the body as being left behind or transformed, in the Disney teen film Sky High, and the YA novel Hero, bodies are neither abandoned nor transformed. Rather, these texts engage with Hayles’s notion of ‘extended bodily awareness’, described above, as a means for developing a posthuman identity and gaining subjectivity. In Sky High, fourteen-year-old Will Stronghold is the son of superheroes, the legendary Commander and Jetstream (a.k.a. Steve and Josie Stronghold, real estate agents par excellence). However, unlike his highprofile, world-saving parents, young Will appears to have no superpowers; a fact of which he is too ashamed to tell his parents. His parents enrol him in their old alma mater Sky High, the high-tech school located in space that trains superheroes of tomorrow. Will’s lack of superpowers is made public when he attends the orientation class in the school gym conducted by the sadistic PE teacher, Coach (Sonic) Boom. The Coach demands that each student demonstrate his/her powers and, depending on the level of ability, he allocates them as either ‘heroes’ or ‘sidekicks’. Will’s failure to display any superpowers means that he is destined to be a sidekick, along with other ‘failures’: long-term friend Layla, who can make plants grow; Zac, who glows in the dark; Magenta, who is a shape-shifter, but can only turn into a guinea pig; and Ethan, who can melt into a colourful pool of liquid. A similar lineage occurs in Hero in that Thom is also the son of superheroes, but unlike Will he only learns about his parents’ glory days after he has gained recognition for his own superpowers – his ability to use his hands to suture and heal wounded bodies. While Will’s parents are the loving couple and their domestic life is one of middle-class bliss, Thom lives with his father in a world of unspoken regrets and emotional pain, and their home is regarded by the neighbours as ‘the shittiest house in the whole subdivision’ (p. 7). Thom’s mother left the family unit when he was a young child and her absence remains central to the emotionally starved relationship between father

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and son. The reason for her abandonment of the family becomes apparent towards the end of the story and forms part of the narrative resolution towards harmony and parent-child reunion. When Thom is recruited to the League of superheroes he is not readily accepted and, like Will, he becomes part of a group of misfits: the volatile and angry Miss Scarlett, who can burst into flames; Typhoid Larry, who makes people sick when they come into physical contact with him; and the cigarette-smoking, no-nonsense, older woman named Ruth, who can see the future. Whereas Will’s secret that he has no superpowers is quickly proven to be wrong when he finds his incredible strength (a ‘late bloomer’, everyone tells him), Thom’s secret is that he is gay; this proves to be a much darker secret given the homophobic community in which he lives. Both Will and Thom come to make moral choices at the risk of their own safety, learn lessons about life and friendship, and most significantly move through a rite of passage from self-absorption to a ‘maturing social awareness’ (Stephens, 1992, p. 3). As Stephens notes, this transition from an immature solipsistic state to one where the individual comes to acknowledge the needs of others is an implicit ideological function of children’s literature. The markers for both Sky High and Hero are therefore their posthumanism, moral reflexivity, and inter/subjectivity. Both texts offer a new-world-order of being posthuman and in so doing raise a prospect that ‘both evokes terror and excites pleasure’ (Hayles, 1999, p. 238), an observation that aligns with Haraway’s poetic account of hope and pain. The terror and pain come from the near apocalyptic endings and the death and destruction that both narratives develop as a result of the ‘bad’ cyborgs’ desire to control and to destroy. The pleasure and hope can be seen in the texts’ celebration of how power and agency, the very elements that the bad cyborgs also desire, can be used for creating peace and harmony. This paradox of emotion is carried through the texts’ privileging of difference at philosophical, social, and ontological levels. The results are that on one hand, it is difficult to differentiate these fictional worlds from our own ‘real’ world politics with their shared manifestations of inequality, corruption, power, and marginalisation; on the other, in celebrating victory over evil, the texts also validate and preserve humanist concerns for personhood and moral integrity, and their closures reproduce the heterosexual family unit as the cornerstone of the cultural imaginary. These multiple outcomes, as I see them, need to be unpacked in order to tease out the ways in which difference is variously understood. Both Will and Thom are made aware by their


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mothers that their powers bring responsibility. The following exchange between Thom and his mother underscores this point: ‘The powers, Thom, they’re a gift.’ ‘Yes, I knew that. I’m learning more about how to use them every day. You’d be surprised by what I can do.’ ‘No. I wouldn’t. In fact, I’m counting on it. But powers are also a tremendous responsibility. There’s a price to pay for using them.’ (Hero, p. 366) Similarly, in Sky High after Will has a fight with a boy named War and Peace (his father was a supervillain and his mother a superhero) and nearly destroys the school cafeteria, his mother expresses her concern about his actions: ‘You nearly destroyed the cafeteria.’ ‘Yeah, but Mom, I got my powers.’ ‘And do you know how to use them wisely?’ Both mothers mediate their sons’ enthusiasm with caution, thereby replacing a potentially threatening cyborgian child with a liberal humanist subject who has a strong moral identity and a sense of accountability. In terms of the texts’ closures, the outcomes are not so easily explained. By the close of Sky High, Will has proven his worth by defeating the evil Royal Pain and her cohorts and is now warmly welcomed by his parents into the new generation of superheroes: the united and formidable ‘Stronghold 3’. As the closing soundtrack plays, Will and Layla move in outer space away from the jubilant crowd at the Homecoming dance. The final scene lingers on the romantic couple as they kiss and dance in a seemingly private space of intimacy. By the conclusion of Hero, Thom’s father has regained his heroic stamina and with the help of Thom, the mysterious Dark Hero, and Thom’s mother, they defeat the League who have revealed their true colours as corrupt and evil megalomaniacs. Thom’s mother redeems herself by sacrificing her life to save her son and former husband. Thom’s father too dies for the cause by latching himself to the rocket that will take him and Uberman, the League’s leader, into oblivion once it is fired. While both parents die, their reunion prior to their deaths enabled the final victory of good over evil, and their coming together was a necessary recuperative strategy

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to perpetuate the fantasy of the heterosexual family as the foundation stone of a functioning society. The two endings for these texts seem to endorse Butler’s point that ‘kinship is a kind of doing … an enacted practice’ (2004, p. 123). However, Hero appears to offer an answer to Butler’s question: ‘But is there a way to break out of this circle whereby heterosexuality institutes monolithic culture and monolithic culture reinstitutes and renaturalizes heterosexuality?’ (p. 124). Rather than endorse the heterosexual romance that the closure of Sky High offers, Hero closes with Thom and Goran (the mysterious Dark Hero and love of his life) sharing a moment of passion. Their first kiss is given both metonymic and physical emphasis in the closing lines of the book: I heard the whistle of a train as it approached the crossing. I reached my arms around Goran, pulled him in, and our lips met. It felt like flying. (p. 428) As a point of closure, this scene not only leaves the reader with questions about the kind of future Thom and Goran might have (if they have one at all), but in terms of the broader issues that concern us in terms of gender, we could begin to think of new narratives that we can tell about origin, kinship and family, and the certainty of claims to a presumptive heterosexuality. Despite the deployment of posthumanist difference in Sky High and Hero, at the level of gender representation, the narratives give gestural, rather than substantial space to female characters. In both texts familiar female stereotypes and moral extremes proliferate, such as good mother (Josie Stronghold) and bad mother (‘Invisible Lass’ (Thom’s mother)); good girl (Layla) and bad girl (Gwen, who is also Royal Pain). Consequently, despite the female figures having superpowers, they have not evaded cultural stereotyping as the texts persist with a clichéd iconography that reproduces conventional gender representations rather than a liberating cyborg ontology, such as Haraway’s ‘Manifesto’ imagines. The social and sexual issues that Sky High and Hero raise with respect to acceptance of difference are framed and eventually resolved from a humanist standpoint, rather than from that of the posthuman, and this makes a significant perspectival difference between these actual narratives and Haraway’s potential cyborg narrative. In Sky High, Will lives out the adolescent (heterosexual) male fantasy when the gorgeous female lab assistant and student body President, Gwen Grayson, appears to be attracted to him and wants him to take her to the Homecoming dance. (This indulgence in heterosexual fantasy was similarly played


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out in Love. in Cyberia and Terminal Chic where Justine was swept away by Los, the perfect male: sensitive; caring; and not overly-concerned with female appearance.) In Hero, Thom’s gay subjectivity must remain closeted for fear of bringing shame to his father and risking censure by his community. When Simon Hess (alias Ssnake), the man with whom he had a brief but mild sexual encounter, is charged with causing mass murder and destruction, Thom makes the moral decision to come out by telling the community that he was with Hess on the night that the murders occurred. The narration supports Thom’s decision to tell the truth: Once in a while, life gives you a chance to measure your worth. Sometimes you’re called upon to make a split-second decision to do the right thing, defining which way your life will go. These are the decisions that make you who you are. (p. 273) As a result of his action, Thom is subjected to homophobic harassment and his father is unable to talk to him. It is only prior to his father’s decision to die with Uberman, strapped to a rocket, that he comes to accept his son’s sexuality and realise that being able to love is what really matters: ‘Promise me … that you love as much as you can’ (p. 420). While gender and sexuality are given space in these texts, there is virtually no space given to racial difference. Despite Sky High’s attempt at multiculturalism through its ethnically diverse cast, racial difference serves only as a visible marker of diversity and has no narratological function. This absence of racial difference is not only endemic to YA fictions of cyborg bodies, but academic literature on the topic too seems very limited. In their book, Race in Cyberspace, Kolko et al. ask questions about this issue: Does race ‘disappear’ in cyberspace? How is race visually represented in popular film and advertisements about cyberspace? Do narratives that depict racial and ethnic minorities in cyberspace simply recapitulate the old racist stereotypes, do they challenge them, do they use the medium to sketch out new virtual realities of race? (2000, p. 11) These questions remain unanswered at this stage, but deserve revisiting as more cyborg fictions written for young people become available. However, in the light of these questions, I want to turn briefly to consider one example, the animé Sailor Moon, originally written and

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illustrated as a manga6 by Naoko Takeuchi (1998–2001). The superhero is a popular figure in animé, and other Western comic books and graphic novels and stories often cross over into ‘genres of romance, drama, humor, science fiction, horror, adventure, and more actionoriented genres’ (Pawuk, 2007, p. 1). In their discussion of contemporary manga and animé narrative schema, Stephens and Bryce (2004, p. 44) note that while the examples they discuss exhibit what Sato (2004, p. 349) sees as a fetishising and domesticating of female cyborgs into maternal and sexual predators, they argue that there is evidence of the texts’ interrogating and even satirising this convention. However, in Sailor Moon the eponymous character is a female superhero who is the ‘champion of love and justice’ and can be seen as embodying Sato’s observation. She transforms from a rather silly schoolgirl (Usagi) to the sexualised female warrior (Sailor Moon). The ‘sailor’ part of the name refers to the school uniform common to Japan that is transformed from dowdy dress into a sexy mini skirt, with sailor boy collar and bow. Usagi/Sailor Moon is emblematic of Japanese manga characters who have a Euro-American comic-book attractiveness – white skin, round blue eyes, a super body, and extralong blonde pigtails that swirl with the body’s movements. The transformation from adolescent girl to woman offers an exaggerated image of femininity that can be read as a masquerade of the child-woman that fetishises the signs of femininity (long hair, long legs, breasts, and wide eyes). Other female characters are similarly represented with colourful hair and Western physical features and clothing. Consequently, these characters are not racially ‘marked’, rather they appear as ‘white’. In the first episode of the animé version, Usagi is timid and immature, failing at school, and only interested in romance. As the series progresses, she embarks upon a female Bildungsroman as she learns how to use her powers, fight the forces of evil, and grow into maturity. In the English version of the manga, Usagi is known as ‘Bunny’, a diminutive name that further fetishises her girly nature as a male-produced cyborg fantasy. In her investigations into cyborg bodies, Jennifer González considers the question of race a fraught one. She raises a dilemma that is pertinent for YA fiction as well, namely, on one hand, erasure of racial identity can mean a utopian society of equal representation; on the other, ‘e-race-sure’ of this kind assumes that difference is only superficial – literally skin deep. In other words the dilemma rides on the question González asks: ‘are there important differences between people (and cyborgs), or are people (and cyborgs) in some necessary way the same?’ (2000, p. 71). In the case of Sailor Moon it would seem that despite the manga/animé style of


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illustration and storyline, the characters’ Japanese-ness is erased and in its place is a Euro-American hybrid. In her summation of recent Japanese cyborg animé and manga, Kumiko Sato argues that ‘strong female cyborgs and androids so dominant in recent Japanese science fiction are actually presented as referencing signifiers of the empty subject at the center, who is often embodied in the form of a passive, powerless male character’ (2004, p. 353). A similar situation occurs in the animé version of Sailor Moon with Usagi’s boyfriend, Mamoru Chiba, who is also the mysterious Tuxedo Mask (and later revealed as Prince Darien), a character who is sartorially reminiscent of the Phantom of the Opera with his full black opera cape, tuxedo, and white mask. His character is generally portrayed in both the manga and animé as quiet, studious, and introverted. In the animé he appears in every episode to help save Sailor Moon’s life and eventually they marry. Despite his support of Sailor Moon, his presence compared to the strong and independent female superheroes is somewhat diminished, yet ironically he provides the support that Sailor Moon needs in times of battle with the forces of evil. The characters who inhabit the Sailor Moon stories, like others we have discussed in this chapter, are technologically embodied. Sailor Moon too calls attention to ‘difference’ in several ways. Difference is most noticeably performed between organic human bodies and technologically enhanced bodies. Racial difference is reworked into a Euro-American-Japanese representation. It is this hybridising of the characters’ physical features that makes it recognisably a style of Japanese manga/animé art. Sailor Moon also narrativises the difference among the cyborgs based on gender and ethical behaviour. As cyborgs, they come to represent bodies that know no limits; concomitantly, the transformation from human to cyborg highlights the human body’s malleability or adaptability to become Other. While the characters appear to be free from the constraints of embodiment, they nevertheless continue to hold on to their gender and sexual identities (unlike Justine in Virtual Sexual Reality who experiences a transformation of her gender/sexual identity). Consequently, the characters repeat gender performatives that are familiar to children from their previous engagements with narratives of adventure, romance, and heroes defeating the forces of evil. While this text reimagines embodiment as being technologically enhanced it nevertheless retains the already-ness of its identifications as being inscribed by gender and sexuality and to a lesser extent race. In other words, the posthuman characters simply become better versions of their human selves, or ‘improved artifacts’ as Wilson notes at the beginning of this chapter.

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The dilemmas that framed this chapter in the opening epigraphs raise issues of moral decisions and ontological status with respect to technology and posthumanism. As we have seen in my discussion of the texts, these twin aspects inform the ways in which the post/human subject achieves subjectivity and agency as part of their acceptance in a community. In all the examples, the underlying fantasy is transcendence of the body, through teleporting, technological intervention, or superhuman or cyborg development. What this kind of formulation attempts is a decentring of both the human body and conventional humanist notions of a coherent gendered self. In a similar way, cyberspace or virtual reality provides a way of destabilising the humanist notion of an unproblematic ‘real’. As I have suggested, the examples discussed here tend to dissipate the anxiety that these kinds of decentring processes engender, by turning to resolutions that restore the ‘real’ and reassert an identity that has a ‘true’ subjectivity: Justine eliminates Jake so that her true subjectivity can be restored; Justine and Los return together to her ‘real’ world and time; Melanie is restored to her real self/body and Wanda achieves human subjectivity as Pet; Thom and Will discover their ‘real’ selves as essentially liberal humanist subjects who, despite their superhuman powers, experience human desires; and Sailor Moon through the course of the series comes to find her one true self (as Princess Serenity) and her one true but often-lost love (Prince Darien). Furthermore, the stories demonstrate Hayles’s paradox of terror and pleasure that the posthuman evokes: a paradox that captures society’s ambivalence towards technological advances. In terms of gender and race, it seems that it is business as usual and the opportunities to realise radical alternatives that Haraway posited for cyborgs in a postgender future remain a fantasy. Body politics, however, continue to inform these and other narratives which offer readers imaginative human and posthuman experiences and embodiments, and, as such, they provide a portal into different kinds of ontological and technological existenz.

4 Queer Spaces in a Straight World: The Dilemma of Sexual Identity

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer. (Sir Robert Owen, in Cole, 1930)

What’s in a name? If it is indeed true that ‘all the world is queer’, except for Robert Owen and his addressee, then what kind of world do we inhabit? Is everyone queer – straight and gay alike? Does a queer world mean that queer is the new straight? Of course, such playfulness inevitably forces us to reflect on the way in which the world as we know it is not queer, but one that is schematised according to gender differences and a presumptive heterosexuality. However, Owen’s wry comment also allows us a moment to imagine a different kind of world than the one we currently know. What would it be like if, as Alice declared on her journey to Wonderland, ‘Everything is queer today’?1 What if ‘everything’ from legal to political, social, and everyday practices and policies were defamiliarised and destabilised? My speculation is framed within the understanding of ‘queer’ as a theory that foregrounds a politics of difference. As we know, there are other meanings of queer, such as: odd, peculiar, eccentric, strange, dubious, and no doubt it is these other meanings that Alice was referring to, as was possibly Owen. Nevertheless, as Pouchard (1997, p. 57) notes, ‘the overwhelmingly negative connotations of “queer” run parallel to its uncertain etymology and its early registered use in criminal records’. Thus, the reappropriation of ‘queer’ and its pejorative associations has enabled the word to serve as a political marker of identity for some gay and lesbian people and as a theoretical strategy which attempts to 125

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deconstruct binary oppositions governing identity formation. However, its popular usage from television shows (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; Queer as Folk) to songs (Smells Like Queer Spirit; The Queer Song) to queer fashion accessories threatens to dissipate its political valency by reducing the word to ‘a newer or hipper synonym for gay’ (Carlson, 1998, p. 108, italics in original). This easy slippage into a synonymous relationship between ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ in both academic and lay usage adds further confusion to queer identity politics. Carlson asserts that queer identity ‘flaunts itself unashamedly’, which could be the very reason why ‘homophobia is most fearful of’ it (p. 110). Whereas ‘gay identity’ has become almost domesticated in its oft-repeated reassurance to mainstream society that ‘we are just like you’, queer remains edgy and threatening in its refusal to blend in or be tolerated by the dominant culture as simply good-natured eccentricity. As the heading to this chapter indicates, I explore some of the dilemmas, contestations, and tensions that surround sexuality. I have stated throughout this book that my position with respect to ‘sex’, ‘gender’, and ‘sexuality’ aligns with Foucault, Butler, and others who contend that these categories are discursively constructed over time, and from culture to culture (Salih, 2002). By regarding gender as constructed, rather than ‘natural’ or inevitably connected to sex, Butler contends that neither is an ‘abiding substance’ (1990a, p. 22). This challenge to the metaphysics of substance is at the centre of her account that identity is a practice and gender a performative. The central question that informs this chapter is: what happens when gender and sexual identities do not conform to the dominant system of heterosexuality? In ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1990b), Butler calls for a rejection of the essentialism of binary oppositions such as heterosexuality/ homosexuality, and for a queering of heterosexist master narratives. Butler employs ‘queer’ as a (non) category to disrupt the attribution of identity per se. This disruption extends to the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which Butler (1992) prefers to see remain unclear: ‘I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies’. Queer theorists seek to question essentialising tendencies and to offer ‘a radical rethinking of the relationship between subjectivity, sexuality and representation’ (Selden et al., 1997, p. 254). However, as I mentioned above in terms of the reappropriation of terms such as queer by popular culture, what might appear as a strategic political act of wresting a term away from its prior contexts or resignifying it within dominant discourses raises a further question which Sara Salih asks: ‘Could it be that, like the strategic essentialism from which Butler strategically distances

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herself, such appropriations will strengthen rather than undermine dominant discourse?’ (2002, p. 115). This question is important for our reading of children’s and YA fiction as we need to be alert to the subtleties of language and the discursive positionings that a text offers its readers and its characters. One question that I want to consider first and foremost is ‘what is/ makes a queer story?’ I reject the notion that a story about gay characters makes it ipso facto a queer story, though I concede that such stories may indeed be queer. The other side of the question is ‘what is/makes a queer reading?’ We need to make a useful distinction here between queering in the writing, and a queer reading. The former may of course invite the latter, but the latter need not be determined by the presence of the former. One of the hallmarks of queer theory is its rejection of traditional narrative. As D. A. Miller (1989) argues, it is the ‘discontents’ of narrative that queer stories embody. By ‘discontents’ Miller is referring to the tensions between what he calls ‘narratability’ – the erotic and semiotic dimensions of ‘disequilibrium, suspense and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise’ (p. xi). Thus, the discontents of a text can be seen as those discursive threads that run through the narrative that cannot be neatly resolved or bound by closure. Buchbinder suggests that queering a text, or taking a queer readerly approach, ‘creates the possibility of resistance; and “queer” is, perhaps, above all else, a strategy of resistance’ (1998, p. 164). This ability to resist or subvert the text’s persuasive discourse is expressed by Doty as experiencing queer moments – ‘moments when one finds oneself reading texts or understanding situations from a readerly position which one would not normally occupy’ (quoted in Buchbinder, 1998, p. 166). Of course, such resistance could also be a case of doing an oppositional reading. Hall (2003, p. 116) seems to acknowledge this point by suggesting that in undertaking a queer analysis, like a post-structuralist reading, we must attend closely to the text, paying particular attention to nuance and difference and not glossing over complexity. Given this brief discussion of queer texts and queer reading, the following points from Hall offer a useful summary for determining queer qualities in a text that can guide our queer reading of them: Queer texts politicise and/or allow the critic to politicise the interplay of sexuality and identity; Queer texts abrade or refuse the naturalized binary of hetero-and homosexuality;

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Queer texts often historicize and localize sexuality and sexual identity assumptions; Queer (critical) texts resist facile closure on questions of sexual identity and that helps propel a continuing queer dialogue on sexuality and desire. (Hall, 2003, pp. 165–6) My approach here is to consider a range of texts from picture books, children’s film, and YA novels that offer at the very least ‘queer spaces’, as the title of this chapter suggests. Some of the texts I have selected do not contain explicit or even thinly veiled references to sexual desire. Hall (2003, p. 116) agrees that it is possible to generate a queer reading when a text does not contain even mention of sexual desire or contains only vague references to sexuality, but no manifestations of same-sex desire. However, he suggests that it would be a challenge to try to undertake a queer analysis with such texts. Other texts I discuss deal directly with the subject of sexuality that is outside ‘compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990a, p. 22). In the latter, there is a different kind of reading at stake, one that negotiates between textual representation and a subversive (queer) reading strategy. In other words, if I proclaim my inclination to take up a queer readerly position, then I will more readily align myself with the position the text offers. However, I do not just become the ideal reader, taking up the implied subject position without question. Therefore, by working with a queer approach to narrative with Hall’s guidelines in mind, I want to identify queer moments or spaces in the texts where the represented content is about resignifying normativity by destabilising ‘naturalised’ identity categories. Furthermore, I want to distinguish between those performatives that are subversive of dominant discourses and those that work to consolidate or strengthen them.

Neither fish nor fowl: Reading transgender In this section I focus on how transgendered individuals are represented in YA texts and how these representations attempt to offer queer subject positions that challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity. Transgenderism is only one aspect of queer sexuality, but in YA literature it has not received much attention. Unlike cross-dressing narratives that often use humour to defuse the potentially queer subject or delimit a queer reading, the following texts take a more serious approach. ‘Transgender’ is a term which is often misunderstood and


contested both inside and outside trans communities. Denny (1999, p. 8) describes transgender as referring to ‘individuals whose appearance, behavior, or self-identification varies from binary gender norms’. Furthermore, Denny explains how sometimes transgender is used as a catch-all term to include cross-dressers, transsexuals, as well as gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals. Heyes, too, tends to agree with the view that ‘trans-’ terms encompass various kinds of sex and gender crossing, from medical technologies that transform sexed bodies through surgery and hormone treatment to cross-dressing, to passing, to a certain kind of ‘life plot’ (2000, p. 170). While Heyes claims that ‘trans studies’ is now an autonomous field ‘with its own theoretical and political questions’, she notes that often ‘trans identities’ are read against the backdrop of male dominance and heteronormativity as they still rely on feminist and queer theory as interpretative tools for analysis. However, feminist and queer analytical tools need not be incompatible with the study of everyday lives, which is the subject matter of the following analysis. I suggest that much of the fiction written for children and young adults about transgendered subjects similarly operates against this same backdrop of heteronormativity, with the result that the narratives deal with what could be regarded as an uncomfortable subject by providing a liberal account of empowerment and equality, and by emphasising the difficulties that protagonists from relatively privileged and established social groups endure. I consider how four texts (a YA novel, a mainstream family-rated film, and two picture books) construct transgenderism and a transgendered subject within different frameworks of ‘narratability’ (discontents) and performative disruption. The texts are: Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger (2007); Finding Nemo (2003), directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich; And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, illustrated by Henry Cole (2005); and Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch (2007/8). Parrotfish employs a conventional linear narrative structure and strategies common to YA fiction writing such as a focalising first person narrator to explore transgenderism. Parrotfish is a queer text in that it addresses most of Hall’s points summarised in the introduction to this chapter. Specifically, in having the teenager, Grady, as the female to male (FtM) transgender focaliser, readers are positioned to see how Grady struggles for acceptance within a binary system of gender and sexuality. In this sense, the text engages with the interplay of sexualities and subjectivities and the dilemmas and uncertainties that arise from it. Parrotfish uses queerness as a lens through which to resignify gender

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identity and to redefine familial relationships within the context of Grady’s domestic life. One of the dilemmas that the other characters have in this story is how to address Grady – as a boy or as a girl? This confusion over address is part of the problems of representation that the narrative explores. However, Grady insists that others use masculine pronouns when referring to him. This assignation is necessary for Grady’s desire to embody the masculine and perform as such. Consequently, I use the masculine pronoun when referring to Grady. From the beginning of the story, there is a tension between ‘normal’ and ‘queer’. As Grady (previously known as Angela) helps his father retrieve the Christmas decorations from the garage, news arrives that Aunt Gail (his mother’s sister) has given birth. Grady’s mother’s announcement of the news strikes the first discordant note: ‘It’s a boy!’ she said. ‘A healthy baby boy!’ I dropped the lights I was holding and glared at her. Goddamn it, hadn’t she learned anything from me? ‘Healthy,’ Dad said quickly. ‘That’s the main thing.’ Thank you, Dad. At least he was making an effort to understand. ‘Of course it is,’ Mum said, trying clumsily to plaster over her mistake. ‘That’s what I said. A healthy boy.’ (p. 2) As Grady reflects on the situation he ponders why the first question in relation to a new born child is whether it is a boy or a girl: Because, for some reason, that is the first thing everybody wants to know the minute you’re born. Should we label it with pink or blue? Wouldn’t want anyone to mistake the gender of an infant! Why is it so important? … Not all of us fit neatly into the category we get saddled with on Day One. (p. 3, emphasis in original) Grady’s questioning underscores how persons are initially ‘hailed’ into sex (and consequently gender) through an interpellative performative statement – ‘It’s a boy!’ It also highlights how transgender disrupts the neat, naturalised binary that society seeks to establish. Thus, Grady’s declaration that ‘not all of us fit neatly into the category we get saddled with’ refuses to accept the ‘regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption’


(Butler, 2004, p. 43). Grady performs his own queer performative act by renaming himself with a ‘name that could belong to either gender’ and the ‘gray part of it – you know, not black, not white. Somewhere in the middle’ (p. 6). By being ‘somewhere in the middle’ Grady locates his subject status on a gender continuum and in doing so insists on a transgendered identity that is not reducible to the normative insistence of one or the other of the binary. Consequently, in becoming ‘Grady’ and eschewing his original name, ‘Angela’, Grady effectively disavows the signifier of gender that was assigned at birth. The metaphorical association across gray-Grady as standing in for ‘somewhere in the middle’ is at odds with Grady’s insistence on a masculine referent. To read this inconsistency queerly is to acknowledge queer’s resistance to give categories, and in this case gendered pronouns, the power to define a subject. As the text demonstrates, there is value in being hailed as it provides the individual with the opportunity for resistance or subversion. A similar point was made in the previous chapter’s discussion of Justine’s refusal to be hailed as a simchick (Virtual Sexual Reality). Another metaphor, the parrotfish, operates through the title and through Grady’s developing ease with his transgendered subjectivity. The (real) parrotfish serves as an example that transgenderism exists in other species where it is regarded as ‘normal’. As Grady’s friend Sebastian explains to him, ‘in lots of fish, gender ambiguity is natural – especially in reef fish’ (p. 70). Furthermore, the eponymous parrotfish changes colour when it goes from female to male, the two-banded anemonefish can change either way, as do slipper limpets. Grady comes to see the parrotfish as a metaphor for the mutability of his own sexual subjectivity, a point which becomes clearer further on in the discussion. Sebastian’s point that ‘nature creates many variations’ (p. 71) resonates with the thesis Joan Roughgarden develops in her book entitled Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004). Roughgarden explores gender and sexual diversities in a broad ecological context and calls for a new theory of social selection to replace Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. As a Professor of Biological Sciences and a MtF (male to female) transgender, her book speaks from both her professional and personal backgrounds. Roughgarden offers some interesting and useful information that can both inform our understanding of transgenderism in non-humans and heighten our appreciation of human sex/gender diversity and equal justice for human transgenders, transsexuals, and intersexes.2 Roughgarden notes that: ‘hermaphrodism is a successful way of life for many species … the

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separate-sex/separate-body state is often viewed as “normal”, suggesting that something unusual favors hermaphrodism in plants, on coral reefs and in the deep sea’ (p. 34). Exploring ‘what fish tell us’, Roughgarden reviews species with two male forms, species that undergo sex change from female to male or vice versa, and hermaphrodite forms. There is of course an assumption here that animal behaviour can enlighten us about human practices. However, it is difficult, initially at least, to accept that non-human evolutionary events and lifeways can inform or parallel the complexities of human bodies and cultural and social reproduction. In a further attempt to disrupt the norms of the ideal ‘feminine’ body and to embody a more recognisably ‘masculine’ body, Grady binds his breasts and plans on buying a ‘chest binder’ he found on a website, cuts and combs his hair like a boy, dresses in boys’ clothes, and learns to walk and talk differently. Through the transformation of the surface of the body, Grady describes how ‘my appearance was finally going to match my sense of who I really was’ (p. 19). However, Grady questions why we have to ‘act’ as a girl or a boy. He is bemused by why the girls at his school were always acting like girls, and boys acting like boys ‘but very few people acting like themselves’ (p. 131). So he too is caught in this contradiction as he dresses in boys’ clothes and through his ‘performance’ of masculinity. His suggestion that people should act like themselves has implications for queer subjectivity as it dismisses gender categories, but at the same time (and somewhat contradictorily) it insists on a stable subject (‘themselves’). Grady’s thinking can also be seen to highlight how transgender activism is at odds with queer theory in that the latter seeks to dismantle identity while the former insists on recognition, a point I made above. To ponder a different reality from the one that currently exists with respect to the norms imposed on bodies is perhaps a fantasy, as Butler suggests, but a fantasy that ‘moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable’ (Butler, 2004, p. 28). Grady’s self-fashioning of a recognisably different identity and his attempts to live a different fantasy are not without difficulties. Coming out at school as Grady presents a problem regarding which toilets he can use, and where he can change into his gym clothes. It also means having to suffer the taunts of others who see him as a ‘Freak. Mutant. Pervert’ (p. 59). And when his period arrives unexpectedly at school, the fantasy breaks down (temporarily) and he is faced with the problem of his body letting him down once again. However, his difficulties are not confined to school as his family and friends also have to negotiate his transition.


Grady constructs his gender subjectivity in direct opposition to his mother. Rather than be the feminine subject that his mother is and that she desires for her daughter, Grady desires to be not-female/not feminine. But he also questions why it is necessary to choose ‘one thing or another’: ‘I wish there wasn’t that big division between the two’ (pp. 228–9). Grady has always felt himself to be more his father’s son than his mother’s daughter. In one instance, when Grady and his father speak about his transition, his father tries to articulate this father–son bond he has always felt: ‘Truth is, it doesn’t surprise me that much [that Grady is FtM transgender]. Not that I was expecting it, you understand. Just that, in a way you’ve always been my son. You know what I mean?’ (pp. 104–5). However, Grady takes his father’s words to mean that they had always enjoyed doing ‘“guy” stuff’ (p. 105) such as carpentry and working on cars. But these performances of masculinity are not founded on any basis of ‘truth’ as to a natural body that pre-exists its cultural inscription. As Grady puts it simply: ‘Charlie [his brother] was a boy too, and he didn’t give a damn about cars or carpentry projects’ (p. 105). He also ponders if his mother, his sister, and his best friend, Eve, also suffer from these gender expectations. Throughout the text, Grady theorises gender identities and how individuals ‘do’ gender according to accepted norms. Such sophistication almost belies the fictional status of the adolescent subject and at times the adult authorial voice appears to speak through Grady. As further evidence of authorial ‘authority’ and advice for adolescent readers, Wittlinger provides a list of references, resources and websites about transgender and sexual diversity at the end of the story. Nevertheless, the theorising as such provides readers with insight into an alternative discourse that both queers and queries heteronormative assumptions and regulations. Another way that Parrotfish represents queerness is through Grady’s family, where there is a tension between ‘normal’ and queer which transcends the obvious sexual difference to other areas of familial activity that occur at Christmas time. That things are not ‘normal’ is stated when Grady’s friend Eve does not help with putting up the Christmas decorations: ‘If it had been a normal year, Eve would have helped out too. She always liked being there on Sunday when we put the finishing touches on everything’ (p. 24). Grady’s coming out as a transgender is the disruption to the normal. However, we are positioned by Grady’s account of his father’s Christmas activities to see them as being the activities of a person who is not normal. The father turns the family home and front yard into a Christmas spectacular of lights and kitsch (fake castle turrets, hundreds of white and coloured lights, seven Santas,

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reindeer and sleigh, 68 angel ornaments, Barbies on Ice, matted teddy bears having a picnic, and Christmas carols piped through a sound system to outside the house) – much to the embarrassment of his family. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for engendering a communal Christmas spirit is exceeded by his insistence on the whole family participating in a re-enactment of a scene from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol complete with nineteenth-century costumes and microphones so that the viewing neighbourhood audience do not miss a word. There is an implicit suggestion that these activities perform a particular kind of queerness in their excess. Grady’s address to the implied reader is complicit in its attempt to get the reader to see things from his point of view: ‘You might think no one in their right mind would subject their family to this, but Dad’s parents had done it to him, and he was passing the joy along to us’ (pp. 25–6). Grady’s use of words – ‘subject’, ‘done’, and ‘passing the joy along’ – suggest both subjection and sarcasm. However, we might read the father’s activities as not queer or not ‘normal’, but as eccentric and displaying a kitsch sensibility. But taste is relative, a point that becomes evident when Sebastian tells Grady that he used to love seeing the family’s decorated Santa Village when he was a child. Furthermore, when Sebastian tells Grady, ‘You are so lucky!’, Grady replies: ‘You are so out of your mind’ (p. 85). This returns us to the opening epigraph and its implications about who or what is queer. Despite Sebastian’s excitement about Grady’s family Christmas celebrations, he agrees to Grady’s idea to sabotage the annual play by rewriting the script. Grady uses the family’s annual enactment of A Christmas Carol to insert a political agenda about change. The subsequent flow of events moves from a serious attempt at resignifying normative ways of being to a farce of vaudevillian proportions. In the reworked script that is seen and read for the first time by everyone except Grady and Sebastian, the family members become unwitting participants in a queer discourse of questioning convention. In the following excerpt, Grady, Eve, and Laura play the Cratchits’ children and Grady’s mother plays Mrs Cratchit, and his father is Mr Cratchit. When Mrs Cratchit asks if all the outside decorations are in place, the following dialogue ensues: MR CRATCHIT:

Yes, my dear. Things are just as they should be.

[…] GRADY:

And yet, things do change, Father. You need only look at me to see the truth of that!

Queer Spaces in a Straight World 135 EVE:

LAURA: GRADY:

Yes, this year has seen your Angela become your Grady and exchange her long dresses for his sturdy trousers. And trade her long locks for the haircut of a boy. Things as they should be, Father, are not things unchanging. (pp. 267–8)

As the play progresses, Grady gives ‘real’ presents to each of the cast members as a gesture to acknowledge their significance in his life. But the father’s gift is a notice for volunteers to assist with the ‘Buxton Little Theatre’ productions. This scene serves a dual purpose in the text. On the one hand, it is used to offer an alternative activity for the father so that he can continue to enjoy putting on plays and developing production. On the other, it provides an opportunity to redefine familial relations. The conclusion of the play signifies a break with the past as well as a break with the cycle of repetition that unfolds annually with the Christmas play, and daily through the repetition of gender performatives. However, the presentation of a newly united family who accept difference within their ranks does not solve the dilemma of queer performativity. The closure to the narrative also offers a non-complicated account of the queer performative subject. Grady addresses the reader and explains that ‘Things change. People change’ (p. 287). However, rather than endorsing a queer perspective of the ongoing mutability of a sexual identity, there is an implicit suggestion that he has found his place which is ‘the kid in the middle of the football field, smiling’ (ibid.). Thus, it would seem that Grady is now happy in his status as a masculine subject, and one who enjoys the performative privileges it brings, such as being accepted on the football team. If queer theory opposes all identity claims, including stability of sex and gender, and a queer text ‘does not claim or countenance closure’ (Hall, 2003, p. 167) then Parrotfish resorts in its final moments to what Hall would describe as a ‘facile conclusion’. However, the conclusion does support a pragmatic need for individuals to have a category of recognition in order to live their lives. Even if this category is ‘in the middle’ it still lays claim to a space. I want to backtrack for a moment to comment on another event in Parrotfish which demonstrates the text’s attempt to queer binaries by showing up the complexity of identity categories. In this instance, a drag show is performed by two basketball studs at a school assembly. While the crowd of students find the two boys’ performance as girls

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hilarious, Grady sees it as a blatant display of machismo. Through Grady’s interpretation we are positioned to see how drag performance calls attention to masculinity’s fear of being exposed as anything other than a fixed and invulnerable referent, yet there is a desire that accompanies this fear as the following excerpt suggests: ‘It seemed to me that the more macho the guy, the more he loved prancing around in high heels and a wig, just to prove to everybody that he could’ (p. 123). The drag show for Grady reinforces, rather than subverts, dominant discourse about gender binarism. For the majority of the school population, it would seem that it is just a case of boys having fun. In other words, they presumably see the boys’ dressing up and behaving as girls as the ‘fake’ gender as they know that under this masquerade lies the ‘real’ gender. This separation of the performance of gender into inauthentic and authentic reinforces an ontology (as an account of what gender is) that aligns with the dominant discourse of gender binary and its norms. Flanagan argues that the experience of females cross-dressing in children’s literature can be liberatory in that they can help to interrogate the social construction of gender. However, she notes that for male crossers it is often a different matter: Because their behavior presupposes the superiority of masculine over feminine, their self-assured masculinity permeates every aspect of their cross-dressing experience, rendering comic their inability to comprehend femininity as separate to their own biologically male experience of gender. (Flanagan, 2002, p. 79) Flanagan’s point has relevance for the boys in Parrotfish who demonstrate their inability to comprehend femininity’s difference from their own conceptions and experiences. As Kita, a young woman who finds the boys’ performance insulting and not funny, says: ‘I think it’s insulting to all women when guys parade around like that, acting like we’re no more than jiggling body parts. I can assure you that George Garrison with sock boobs does not equal me!’ (p. 126). While the boys’ performance plays with the fantasy that drag offers, it also invites us to see the possibility of a different corporeal reality: ‘the body is that which can occupy the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation’ (Butler, 2004, p. 217). Following on with Butler’s argument, the ‘thought of the possible’ is for many not a flight of fancy, an instance of playful make-believe, but a question of survival. This alternative way of becoming as vital for survival


is central to Grady’s hopes and the underlying theme of the children’s film, Finding Nemo. While humour is the subject of the next chapter, the film comedy Finding Nemo also has a place here. It is very funny on a number of levels. But like most comedy it has its serious side. The story begins with a male and female clown fish excited by their new home (a sea anemone) and the imminent birth of their 400 offspring. The two anthropomorphised fish, Marlin and Coral, epitomise the romance of the heterosexual couple – adoring, flirtatious, and excited by the prospect of becoming parents and new home owners. However, their bliss is destroyed when a shark suddenly attacks, eating both Coral and 399 of the eggs. The remaining egg matures into ‘Nemo’, a small, male fish with a deformed fin. Marlin takes on the role of the sole carer of his offspring, but his traumatic experience has turned him into an over-anxious and over-protective parent. When Nemo commences his first day at school, he rebels against his father’s obsessive and restrictive ministrations by swimming away from the school community into dangerous open seas. His act of defiance results in his being captured by a diver and taken to live in an aquarium in a dentist’s surgery in Sydney (Australia). Thus, this second act of devastation serves to undo the ‘realities’ of their former existence with its restrictive way of being to explore another possibility – a braver and more social one that is vital for their survival. This new possibility means that Marlin has to overcome his fears of the ocean and its predators to embark on a quest to find Nemo and return him to his home. For Nemo, it means learning to do things that he and Marlin thought were impossible due to his size and deformity. To read this film within the context of queer and transgenderism requires us first to consider Roughgarden’s thesis about social selection and hermaphrodism as part of a ‘natural’ order of species’ diversity. According to Roughgarden, ‘sex change is only one of the interesting aspects of coral reef fish society’ (2004, p. 31). She argues that many fish, parrotfish and clown fish among others, are hermaphroditic. While separate-sex/separate-body state may be the norm for terrestrial environments, she posits that hermaphrodism may be the ‘original norm’ in that it is prevalent in plants, on coral reefs and in the deep sea. Roughgarden provides interesting information on the dynamic nature of fish communities whereby there exist multiple genders and flexible sexual identity for some fish, and social and sexual organisations change when a change occurs to the ecological context. Dickemann notes that Roughgarden ‘restricts “sex” to gamete size, gender to all else: genetics, physiology, morphology, and behavior’ (2008, p. 313).

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However, by widening the meaning of gender to refer to non-human species, Roughgarden contends that her definition that ‘Gender is the appearance, behavior, and life history of a sexed body’ (2004, p. 27, emphasis in original) enables study of gender across zoological, botanical, and human gender studies. Roughgarden’s discussion of clown fish enables a ‘queer’ context for reading Finding Nemo: ‘The female is larger than the male. If she is removed [as she is in Finding Nemo], the remaining male turns into a female, and one of the juveniles matures into a male [as is the case for Nemo]. The pair is monogamous’ (p. 33). While the film provides accurate ecological content in that the two clown fish inhabit a sea anemone, if we extend the reality of clown fish to the fantasy of the film’s representation, then Marlin’s over-anxious, over-protective behaviour towards Nemo could be read (stereotypically) as over-protective mothering by the remaining male who has transsexed and become female. This observation of ‘possibility’ of transgender is shared by Halberstam in her discussion of the film: ‘Finding Nemo, covertly harbours a transgender narrative about transformation’ (2006, p. 112). Furthermore, Halberstam suggests that subsequent events in the film, whereby Marlin’s teaming up with Dory and their final immersion into a diverse community of fish in the aftermath of the successful quest, are not so much about the dominance of sexual selection or the reproductive circuit, but more about ‘an adaptive process of affiliation that creates stable community rather than familial structures’ (p. 113). I want to continue with Halberstam’s discussion, aligning with her general argument. I also want to consider the contradictions that may occur from an alternative queer perspective. Halberstam’s point about ‘stable community’ has relevance in this text if we consider that gender and sexuality are derived from social norms. Butler makes the point that agency or self-determination is only possible in a context of a social world that supports and enables agency (Butler, 2004, p. 7). According to this argument, individual agency is tied to social transformation. As I mentioned previously, the conditions that constrain are also the means by which resistance can be undertaken. Working with Finding Nemo we can use this understanding of the social context to assist with imagining a community, that through transformation, might lead to a stable and safe context in which to live ‘a livable life’. Dory, the helpful but dithering and forgetful bluefish, provides Marlin with companionship on his quest and, despite her failings, her presence enables him to go beyond his fear threshold and do things that he previously thought were not possible for him (such as venturing into


the open seas and surviving dangerous situations). When the two successfully locate Nemo and return home, Dory becomes part of Marlin’s original community. In drawing on Roughgarden’s narratives of social cooperation and the sharing of resources within the animal communities, Halberstam suggests that Dory ‘becomes recognizable in her relation to family’ (p. 113), despite her non-family status. For Halberstam, this diversity of community, friendship, and affiliation speaks directly to the possibilities of social change and a reimagining of kinship. Social change also occurs for Marlin and Nemo who have moved from their reclusive existence inside the sea anemone to one where they share in a community of social inclusivity. Marlin is also transformed from a bore (who does not live up to the descriptive name of his species as a ‘clown’ fish) to a popular hero with tales to tell of high adventure and feats of courage. If we are to accept the fish community in Finding Nemo as analogous to the social and transgender possibilities for humans then we need to consider how queer performativity is both self-referential and social. This theorising of a radical rupture of humanism’s desire for social cohesion and community is at odds with the diverse but harmonious community that we glimpse at the closure of Finding Nemo. This latter description can accommodate degrees of stability without sacrificing the diversity of its members. We are left at a similar theoretical and pragmatic impasse to the one we reached in discussing Parrotfish. The argument about community and inclusivity seems to me to pivot on the status of the subject and the conditions by which the subject can live with self-determination and agency. If the subject is separated from sociality, then are we denying what I would argue is a crucial aspect of subjectivity, namely, the subject’s ethical relations with others? In terms of children’s literature, texts often are concerned with intersubjectivity or characters developing an intersubjective sense of responsibility. A denial of ethical relations or intersubjective responsibility can in effect marginalise others through processes of exclusion, a process that can be applied to non-queer and queer communities alike. At a simple narrative level, Finding Nemo engages with an ethics of responsibility as diverse species come to the aid of the ‘other’: Marlin risks his life to save Dory when she is stunned by jellyfish; sea turtles guide Marlin and Dory on their journey to Sydney Harbour; a whale who swallows the pair allows them to resume their quest by ejecting them through its blowhole; and the aquarium fish support the reunion of Marlin and Nemo. Maybe texts such as Finding Nemo, and the following examples, provide us with a way out of the dilemma of subjectivity by opening up the ethical space of alterity as a necessary part of taking responsibility outside of self-interest.

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I turn now to a picture book – And Tango Makes Three – which tells the story of how two male chinstrap penguins successfully hatch an adopted egg and maintain shared parenting of the female chick named Tango. The story begins by introducing readers to the various heterosexual animal families who live at the Central Park Zoo in New York. It then continues with the familiar courting and mating narrative by saying that Every year at the very same time, the girl penguins start noticing the boy penguins. And the boy penguins start noticing the girls. When the right girl and the right boy find each other, they become a couple. (2005, unpaged) The disruption to the heterosexual ‘romance’ narrative occurs when two male penguins – Roy and Silo – prefer each other’s company instead of the female penguins. Their playful and affectionate behaviour prompts the zoo attendant to think ‘They must be in love’. After observing the home making techniques of the other penguins, Roy and Silo build ‘a nest of stones for themselves’, sleeping there together like other penguin couples. However, after their failed attempts to hatch a chick from a rock, they eventually hatch Tango after the zookeeper places an abandoned egg in the nest. As the text tells us: ‘Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.’ The paratext explains that the story is based on fact as two penguins (Roy and Silo) ‘discovered each other in 1998 and they have been a couple ever since’. However, as Helms (2006) reports, the real story has taken an interesting turn. It seems that Silo has abandoned Roy for Scrappy, a female penguin, and Tango has found a mate of her own, another female named Tazuni. Roughgarden contends that the subject of same-sex sexuality in animals, particularly notions of homosexuality, is a contested one in scientific discourse. It also seems that the topic is off limits for some parents who objected to And Tango Makes Three because it had ‘homosexual undertones’.3 However, Roughgarden’s position is clear: ‘homosexuality in animals is exceptionally important and challenges basic premises of evolutionary biology’ (p. 128). She gives accounts of ‘lesbian lizards’ and same-sex matings in bird species, sheep, squirrels, dolphins, seals, whales and primates. MacFarlane et al. (2007) also concur on the matter of homosexuality in animals and claim that over 130 avian species, including penguins, engage in same-sex mating and homosexual behaviours. While the mating aspect of same-sex animals is one aspect of And Tango Makes Three, another is the parenting roles of same-sex couples. Typically, male and female penguin parenting


involves the male incubating the egg in his brood pouch for about 65 days, while the female returns to the sea to feed. He will also feed the chick a white milky substance produced by a gland in his oesophagus and keep it warm until the mother returns. Roughgarden (p. 141) offers other examples of same-sex parenting. For example, female red squirrels mount each other and raise a single litter of young. While both nurse the young, only one of the pair is the mother. However, the same kind of bonding does not exist between male and female red squirrels. Also, male bottlenose dolphins form and maintain lifelong pair bonds, bonding at adolescence. The paired male dolphins protect each other from predators and take turns at keeping watch while the other rests. These examples along with And Tango Makes Three and Finding Nemo open up ways of thinking about different familial and social alliances which reimagine kinship. Both Tango and Nemo are raised without mothers and in these texts, like the instances cited from the animal world, ‘mother’ becomes a shifting signifier that can be temporarily attached to males or females. Or to put this in queer terms, by denying the category ‘mother’, we have shown how mothering behaviour/ performance is not necessarily tied just to the female parent. Roughgarden’s observations about diversity in ‘nature’ alert us to the limits that a narrow socio-normative view allows. It also helps us to reflect on diversity in human family configurations and kinships and the impact on them of normative legal, social and ethical discourses.4 In distinguishing between ‘kinship’ and ‘marriage’, Butler (2004, p. 102) makes the point that both terms are often confused (at least in the United States, but arguably in other countries too) and that marriage is often regarded as a sacrosanct heterosexual institution and unless kinship too assumes a recognisable family form then it does not qualify for recognition. As Butler states, there are numerous examples from many countries where kinship relations exist without conforming to the nuclear family (heterosexual) model. For example, in his study of Dakota kinship and gender ideals, Mark Rifkin (2006) asks: ‘what are heterosexuality’s contours and boundaries, and where in relation to them do indigenous forms, especially traditional forms, of sex, gender, and eroticism lie?’ (p. 27). Rifkin’s question can not only be extended to other indigenous communities, but also to non-heterosexual kinship groups as it draws attention to ways in which dominant culture with its policies, legislation, rules, and social entitlements configures ‘family’ in ways that privilege a heterosexual binarism. As he notes: ‘the heterosexual imaginary is just as inappropriate and obfuscatory in considerations of native marriage, family, and [non-normative] procreation

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as it is in treatments of more “queer” topics, such as transvestism and homosexuality’ (p. 28). The children’s picture book Odd Bird Out also speaks of kinship and the ways in which those who appear ‘odd’ (queer) or different may find a space of possibility beyond the norms and limits that constitute gender and a community of sameness. Its title sounds a double note of being on the margins and a demand to leave – both are taken up in the narrative. Robert is a raven with a difference. He prefers to wear bright colours, is chirpy, likes to dress up, dance, tell jokes, and has a joie de vivre that sets him apart from the black-clad, sombre community in which he lives. (An image of Robert appears on the cover of this book.) The community regards Robert’s singing of songs (‘Come Fly with Me’) in drag as ‘out of tune’, his jokes ‘juvenile’, and his subverting of convention and the rules of the norm causes the community to ask: ‘Didn’t he know … that the appropriate, the prescribed, the only possible colour for a raven, was black?’ Finally, when Robert appears as a singing peacock (or perhaps a peahen) he is booted out of the community: ‘Scram! Skedaddle! You’re a scandal,’ they squawked. ‘Now scoot!’ (see Figure 4.1). Robert finds a new community of diverse bird species far away, which is appreciative of his individual sartorial style and singing. Robert’s career takes off and when his old community decides that life is a bit boring,

Figure 4.1 From Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press


the new ‘flashy bird called Bobby Raver’ appears and is a ‘dazzler’. It seems that the new hit wonder is able to transform the community who now ‘dress up for his concerts in the most outrageous, outlandish plumage’. This amusing picture book brings together a number of discourses about stardom, popular culture and fame that offer us tempting avenues to explore. Significantly for our purpose here, these discourses carry a queer quality in their excessive camp imagery and contrasting representations of normality/queerness. The queer excess, conveyed through Robert’s colourful and flamboyant clothes, and through the words ‘flashy’, ‘dazzler’, and ‘Raver’, offer a mildly satirical edge to the writing and in ways in which we can read queerly. This playful picture book provides an accessible story for young readers of the ways in which communities can be characterised by both difference and sameness. While Roughgarden contends that ‘cross dressing’ and ‘transgenderism’ exist in many birds, ravens appear to be consistent in colour and habits for both males and females. However, they do have vocal ability to mimic the sounds and calls of other birds – Robert takes mimicking to another level of sophistication! If we move away from the ecological and evolutionary argument for a moment, and queer this story by considering its narrative of expulsion – migration – integration as an example of queer diaspora, we can then reimagine communities that are not based solely on origin, genetics, and a common set of social practices and attributes, but on destination, affiliation, and difference (Eng, 2003). Robert can be seen to stand in for the queer diasporic subject in that he deliberately refashions his subjectivity both within and outside his place of origin. By his flamboyant cross-dressing, that mixes animal and human sartorial styles, and unconventional ways of being within the community, Robert achieves an ambiguous subjectivity that disrupts the sign of ‘raven’. This disruption is either desired or repudiated by the different communities. Robert too desires disruption of the conventions and norms of the community, yet retains his ravenness in both his ability to mimic and his decision to return, albeit under the pseudonym of Bobby Raver. His exile is characteristic of his diasporic condition, but rather than find further rejection, he finds recognition in a new community. Furthermore, his newly developed subjectivity and new name enable his return and acceptance. However, the harmonious closure of this story could have been denied if Robert, like many diasporic and queer subjects, had not found recognition abroad or at home. This story has a timely meaning as at the moment we are witnessing global changes in new social formations and identities. For instance, the transnational shifts that have been occurring since the nineteenth

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century have seen the expansion of migration across the globe. Accompanying more recent migratory patterns is a vocabulary of terms that are associated with both exploitation of women and children (‘mail order brides’; ‘sweatshops’ ‘child labour’, ‘domestic servants’) and privilege with respect to the new Asian transnational capitalist and managerial class (‘satellite people’, ‘reverse settlers’, and ‘flexible citizenship’) (Eng, 2003, p. 5). Similarly, many countries are variously accepting or denying the demands by some gay and lesbian activists for same-sex marriage, adoption, custody rights, inheritance, and anti-discrimination legislation to extend to employment and service in the military. Eng notes that ‘it is in this climate of heightened assimilation and state sanction, as well as through the rhetorics of equal opportunity and multicultural inclusion, that contemporary permutations of family and kinship must be rethought’ (p. 5). This matter of inclusivity that Eng raises is one that we could see occurring at the conclusion of Finding Nemo. A similar conclusion occurs in Odd Bird Out. When Robert returns to his home community his flamboyance and dazzling performance motivate the other birds to express their difference by diverse dress (see Figure 4.2). Thus, the story privileges a closure of individuality, of self-presentation, and acceptance.

Figure 4.2 From Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press


This final optimistic note provides readers with a familiar closure, one that is often used in children’s literature to convey harmony and resolution of problems. A similar closure was evident in Finding Nemo where Dory the forgetful fish finds a place in a new community. Both texts can be understood as expressing through their closures particular multicultural discourses that carry notions of inclusivity, acceptance, and community. Given the aesthetic and ideological positions on offer to readers from these closures, is there a space for a queer reading? Do these texts offer a possibility for both resignification and working through the dilemma of subjectivity and identity we have been exploring to this point? One possible way to consider these questions is through the trope of forgetfulness that is implicit in Odd Bird Out but an explicit characteristic of Dory in Finding Nemo. When Robert returns to his original community, there is an implicit suggestion that the community’s acceptance is based on a change in attitude brought about by Bobby Raver. This is also the implication that their acceptance of change is possible because they seem to forget (at least temporarily) who he really is: ‘Funny though – Bobby reminded them of someone. Who could it be?’ However, Robert/Bobby appears to not forget his past relations with this community, and in response to their question, the narrator tells us: ‘But that was Bobby’s secret’. By refusing to let the weight of the past deny the prospect of a livable future in the community to which he chooses to belong, Bobby continues to keep the memory a secret. Thus, in queering this text we can read how identity can be resignified and how context can afford a means for a redefined subjectivity. Another example to consider is Dory in Finding Nemo. Halberstam sees Dory as offering a fascinating model of queerness – ‘queer time (short term memory), queer knowledge practices (ephemeral insights) and anti-familial kinship’ (2006, p. 112). However, Halberstam also concedes that forgetfulness can easily be used as a ‘tool of dominant culture, a mode of oppression’ in terms of cultural erasure (p. 113). In considering ethical possibilities, Butler speculates whether collective means can be found to protect without eradicating those who are vulnerable to violence and marginalisation: Surely, some norms will be useful for the building of such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor. (Butler, 2004, p. 231)

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The texts discussed in this section contain various degrees of queerness and in so doing provide readers with spaces to undertake a queer analysis. As discussed, these spaces open out ways for reading the implicit and explicit ways in which change can be a means for denaturalising gender, sex, and sexuality, for introducing an acceptance of diversity, and for disrupting fixity of self-identification and community. However, as I have indicated, these texts tend to provide closures which resolve tensions or narrative discontents; such narrative attempts at closure run counter to queer texts. While we cannot make texts into something they aren’t, we can, however, work to resist and subvert the positions a text offers – queer or otherwise.

Barking up the wrong tree While the four texts above provide optimistic resolutions to the dilemmas of identity, the following texts provide more ambivalent outcomes. The focus now shifts to Luna (2005) by Julie Anne Peters, Hard Love (1999) by Ellen Wittlinger, and What I Was (2007) by Meg Rosoff. These three stories share the common theme of falling in love with the wrong person. Aly loves Liam/Luna who is transgender (Luna); John loves Marisol who is a lesbian (Hard Love); and an unnamed male narrator is captivated by the enigmatic Finn (What I Was). This idea of mistaken identity is one which is often employed in comedy. For example, Shakespeare used the comedic device of cross-dressing in his ‘Comedy of Errors’ plays such as Twelfth Night; Hollywood comic films too have used transvestism and gender bending as central to their plots (Tootsie; Victor/Victoria), and the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s ‘sweet transvestite from Transylvania’ has spawned numerous imitators by both trans and straight enthusiasts. However, the serious side of ‘mistaken identity’ when it concerns transsexualism and transgenderism has also received attention in film and literature. For example, the tragic story of real-life FtM transgender Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena, who was raped and murdered by his male friends in Falls City, Nebraska when they found out about his ‘real’ identity, was retold in the independent (American) film Boys Don’t Cry (1999); and the Belgian-French film Ma View en Rose (1997)5 tells a story of a young child’s abjection when his family and community fail to come to terms with his cross-dressing (see Mallan, 2006). There are obvious parallels between Parrotfish and Luna as both deal with a transgender. However, whereas the modality of Parrotfish is largely declarative in that it imparts knowledge about transgenderism and its social construction, Luna is less didactic in that the focalising narrator


is Luna’s sister, Regan, who provides a questioning and contradictory account of how Luna’s transgenderism impacts on her relationships with her sibling, their parents, and friends. This focalisation does not necessarily enable a more interrogative text to emerge, but it does provide spaces whereby different points of view jostle for the reader’s allegiance or rejection. It also helps to displace the authorial and authoritative voice we saw in Parrotfish (the attempt through paratextual information to lend weight to the author’s ‘authority’ on the subject). The metaphor of space is endemic to narrative. As action moves forward or backward in time it also traverses or lingers in narrative spaces. This chapter’s interest in locating queer spaces in texts is an attempt to recognise instances or moments when the text offers possibilities for reading queerly through queer content or through its words and images. The matter of space is central to all narratives and inevitably features as a consideration for their characters. In terms of a queer subject, private and public spaces offer contradictory moments for secrecy, violence, and intimacy. A common element of many texts about queer subjectivity is that sexuality is often spatially characterised by public interest, censure, and often intervention in the form of separation, counselling, or violence.6 While Grady (Parrotfish) is the victim of gossip, name-calling, and childish pranks (a group of girls hide his clothes when he is in the showers at school), Luna suffers physical violence when she is beaten up for ‘coming out’ as a girl at school. Up until this point, Luna had lived a dual existence. In the private spaces within her home, she would cross-dress, transitioning over the years from Lia to Luna, all the time transforming from ‘Liam’ – her public masculine persona. The first time that Regan sees this transformation is when she unwittingly interrupts ‘Lia’ (as a child) absorbed in his/her private fantasy being played out in their mother’s bedroom: The door’s ajar and I push it all the way open. My eyes fix on the girl who’s sitting in Mom’s vanity seat, spreading lipstick over her stretched back lips. She has long blonde hair and she’s wearing a sweater exactly like Mom’s … She caps her lipstick tube and laughs suddenly. She speaks to herself in the lighted mirror: ‘I know. Could you believe he said that to her?’ She clucks her tongue and flips a lank of hair over her shoulder. (pp. 195–6, emphasis in original)7 In this captured moment we are witness to Lia’s attempts to perform femininity, and his/her convincing performativity doubly encodes the moment as it also destabilises binary oppositions. However, the more

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difficult aspect of transgenderism as experienced by Grady, and to a lesser extent Luna, is the matter of whether the transgender is homosexual or heterosexual. In Parrotfish, Grady comments on whether she is transitioning to transgender via lesbianism: ‘I went from tomboy to lesbian to short-haired guy-in-a-flannel-shirt’ (p. 39); however, while she thinks, ‘I’m fairly sure my sexuality is just plain old heterosexual male’ (p. 21), she is not sure how to interpret her erotically charged feelings when she falls for Kita Charles, a beautiful and ‘exotic’ student of Japanese-African American heritage. For Grady, then, being transgender is both about identifying as a boy and being sexually attracted to a girl. While Kita is attracted to Grady and knows that he is transgender, Aly (Luna) loves ‘Liam’ but is unaware that he is transgender, and when Regan tells her she is both shocked and angry. Luna, however, is not sexually attracted to Aly, but does fantasise about other males. The erotic discontent in both texts is part of the transgender subjects’ dilemma (especially when transsexualism has not occurred). Is Grady a lesbian or a boy? Is Luna homosexual or a girl? These questions arise in these texts if not explicitly then implicitly through the queering of desire. The answers to these questions are open to conjecture. We could reason that for Grady and Luna doing masculinity or doing femininity brings its own pleasures and personal rewards. For instance, Luna delights in the accoutrements of feminine dress, but wants to anatomically transition to a woman's body. Grady does not delight so much in masculine accoutrements, but regards them as serving a more functional purpose in allowing him to be recognised as male. Closure in both texts is left open to possibilities and uncertainties, despite the point that both characters exit with smiles on their faces. Luna is off to have sex-reassignment surgery; the pleasures of identifying as female exceed those of sexual desire. However, her desire for a ‘rebirth’ (p. 247) is no guarantee of happiness. While Grady considers the prospect of such a transition in the future, he recognises that ‘change’ and ‘luck’ are the only constants in life. Therefore, we can identify the queer in both novels’ represented content by seeing how their narratives offer a view of subjectivity as always in a state of becoming. We can also see how gender is not synonymous with sexuality, and, perhaps more significantly, how gender is a temporarily defined identity that is open to transformation. A further kind of transformation that emerges from the erotic interplay in the construction of gendered subjects is what I now endeavour to trace in Hard Love. In Hard Love, John’s opening words tell us: ‘I am immune to emotion’ (p. 1). He is also ‘a pretty crappy friend’ (p. 2) to Brian, the only person


who wants to hang out with him. He also does not like his mother’s boyfriend, Al, for no apparent reason, and he is immune to his mother’s misery that has engulfed her for the past five years since her divorce. He confesses that he doesn’t like thinking about sex and is not interested in girls or boys, and acknowledges that maybe this makes him ‘weird’: I mean it worries me sometimes, because I guess guys my age are supposed to be like Brian, lusting after pouty lips and big boobs. But to me, the mystery of female body parts is one I’d just as soon not solve. Not that I’m interested in boys either – I’m just not interested in the whole idea of locked lips or proclamations of love. I can’t imagine being in love with somebody, letting her touch me and tell me things I wouldn’t know whether to believe. (p. 19) Given his suspicion of love and lack of interest in people, it comes as a surprise when he finds himself infatuated with Marisol, a self-declared ‘Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee lesbian’ (p. 23). However, in applying ‘queer’ to both John and Marisol, we can see how both do not conform to what Butler (1990a, p. 30) has described as a heterosexual matrix of power. Rather, both characters demonstrate how they do the constructions of gender and sexuality differently. John and Marisol share a common interest in zine writing: an activity which is also on the margins of mainstream publishing (Hard Love, with its off-centre formatting and unconventional font, can also be read as an attempt to mimic its subject of destabilising convention and norms of construction). It is Marisol’s Escape Velocity zine that first brings her to the attention of John, who is impressed with her eclectic style and ability to lay ‘her life out for people to see, like she loves the weird way she is’ (p. 10). When John meets Marisol his initial impression is that her appearance matches her voice – ‘sharp and dangerous’ (p. 21). When she asks if he is trying to pick her up, his response is meant to reassure her that not only does her lesbianness demarcate a zone of offlimits, but as he ‘doesn’t really like girls much’ (p. 24) his offer to go for ice cream does not carry a sexual agenda. Nevertheless, John does fall for Marisol, and while the two become friends, there is always the unspoken silence of queer desire that lurks as a third wheel in their relationship. In reworking the Lacanian notion that desire is never just dyadic in its structure, Butler suggests that the ‘third is both inside the relationship, as a constituting passion, and “outside” as the partially unrealised and prohibited object of desire’ (2004, p. 140). For John, his

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uncertainty about his sexuality remains ‘partially unrealised’: ‘“I’m not gay,” I told her, though I really had no strong evidence for saying so. “At least I don’t think I am”’ (p. 27). For Marisol, her lesbianness provides a subjectivity which she enjoys, ‘a constituting passion’, but it also makes John the ‘prohibited object of desire’. This is ambiguously expressed in the following excerpt when she tries to explain to John her feelings: She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. ‘No, not … love. Some kind of deep … connection.’ She put her hand over her heart. ‘Which is confusing. And that’s why it has to be over now.’ (p. 165) The three points of ellipsis that repeat in this excerpt offer spaces for us to see queer desire at work by making the unspoken, the hesitations, complicate the extent to which desire is static, firmly fixed, knowable or mutable, contingent, and arbitrary (Hall, 2003, p. 151). Marisol’s hesitations in this excerpt are at odds with her insistence on a fixed and an acknowledged identity. Not only does she declare herself in terms that reflect this: ‘Brian, dear, I am a lesbian’ (p. 161), but she also insists that John decide if he is gay or straight: ‘If you don’t know who you are, how is anybody else supposed to get to know you?’ (p. 56). For Hall, ‘the point of queer theories generally is that we are not all “really” any one thing’ (2003, p. 101). However, this state of ambiguity does not necessarily translate to how queers might wish to live their lives. Queer theory’s insistence on fluidity and refusal of categories such as ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’ is not shared by these fictional characters. Thus, in their attempts to foreclose desire so that it is directed towards a stable identity, Marisol and John also attempt to fix sexuality. From a queer perspective, that draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, p. 292) theories, we can see how desire, rather than being channelled along the homosexual/heterosexual routes, can take multiple paths. This view sees desire as multidirectional, nomadic, and migratory, and is different from the Lacanian view that defines desire in binary terms of loss and absence. In seeking public recognition of her queerness, Marisol dresses and acts in a way that refuses to be ‘feminine’ or ‘femme’ – fat, black boots, black jeans, black leather jacket, shoulder-length black hair with spiky ends – but despite her small size, John notes: ‘Big or little, she was kind of scary’ (p. 21). She is definitely the antithesis of her mother who likes to buy Laura Ashley clothes. When Marisol agrees to accompany John to the prom she surprises him by turning up in an elegant, full-length,


fitted black dress, and wearing her usual boots. After Marisol rejects John’s attempt to kiss her at the dance, he accuses her of deliberately looking ‘beautiful’ and ‘available’ (p. 163) by dressing that way. His comment is similar to rape victims being accused of asking for it by dressing in a way that signifies that they are ‘available’. John’s erotic response to Marisol’s parodic dressing as a femme fatale fails to see the masquerade of femininity that she performs so that she can be seen to be his partner for the dance. She counters his accusation by saying: ‘I was supposed to wear overalls and a T-shirt so you wouldn’t get confused?’ (p. 163). Thus, both Marisol’s attempt at feminine/femme style and John’s erotic response when he knows she is in fact unavailable highlight how the superficial trappings of gender performance play a strong part in shaping desire. The text also shows how ‘doing’ gender is a contextualised activity whereby the social or institutional location may permit or prohibit a particular sartorial style and performativity. The prom provides one context in which Marisol attempts to fit in for John’s sake, but when John visits a gay bar with her, he is the one who feels that he doesn’t fit: ‘Half the clientele were pierced, dyed, moussed, muscled, and tattooed. I felt like I had a neon sign flashing over my head: NAÏVE STRAIGHT KID’ (p. 192). Just as to ‘do’ gender means to live up to normative conceptions of femininity and masculinity, it would seem equally true that to ‘do’ butch/femme/boi lesbianism or transgender or gay is similarly performed according to resistance to normative gender, but styled nevertheless in recognisable ways. In writing about how the performativity of gender involves the stylisation of bodies and acts, Butler insists on ‘so many “styles of the flesh”, but styles that are never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit possibilities’ (1990a, p. 139). While the body as a surface on which social significations are inscribed has been the subject of gender studies for some decades, Butler’s point that gender is a corporeal style is one that still requires further fleshing out. Her point is not necessarily deterministic as it allows for negotiation and agency. The site of agency, according to Butler, is located in the variation of the repetition of performative acts. By the conclusion of Hard Love, John and Marisol go their separate ways, but agree to remain friends. This ending avoids the narrative collapsing into a heterosexual romance. As John’s mother tells him: ‘Sometimes you just fall in love with the wrong person’ (p. 216). What I Was has a similar story of falling for the wrong person. It also deals with other issues that we saw emerging in Hard Love, namely, the notion of agency and the risk of gender assessment when normative

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conceptions of femininity and masculinity are disrupted. As its title implies, What I Was is a memoir, told from the point of view of the now ageing, male (unnamed) narrator in a time not too far into the future. It tells about a period of time in his life when as a sixteen-year old in 1962 he became entranced by an enigmatic ‘boy’ named Finn who lived alone in a beach hut on a small peninsula named The Stele, on the coast of East Anglia. The narrator and Finn are opposites in many clearly evident ways according to family structure, class, privilege, formal schooling, and physicality. However, rather than see Finn’s life as one of lack, the narrator desires to be Finn with his solitary, self-sufficient existence by the sea. A couple of times, the narrator notes that Finn is a fantasy – both a fantasy version of himself ‘with the face I had always hoped would look back at me from the mirror’ (p. 18) and a fantasy that he ‘didn’t feel inclined to share’ (p. 23). However, he is quick to say that at this point in the early stages of his relationship the ‘fantasy’ was not sexual. Rather, Finn embodied the narrator’s fantasy of a Boys’ Ownstyle adventure story – being adventurous, courageous, solitary, and athletic. As the narrator steals away from his boarding school, St Oswald’s, to retreat to a life with Finn, his time with him takes on the quality of a romance in its idyllic setting and lifestyle that is not regulated by timetables, bells, and teachers. Rather, it is an existence that is in step with the pace and flow of nature – the tides, the fishing, the storms, and daily routines necessary for self-sufficiency. As he notes: My safe, conventional suburban upbringing had involved the consumption of food, but preparation had always been the sole domain of adults. I could open a fridge or a biscuit tin, hack a wedge off a piece of cheese or cut a slice of bread. But I couldn’t make a meal out of something I pulled from the sea. It had never occurred to me that food could be found somewhere other than on the high street. (p. 63) The romance that the narrator constructs provides relief from the lacklustre life of the boarding school with its rules, petty bullying, injustices, and grey, greasy food. But it is also a relief from the hegemonic masculinist culture of repression, competitiveness, and individualism that he both embodies and abhors. The adventure romance is soon replaced by a more romantic attraction to Finn, and he admits: ‘It was love, of course, though I didn’t know it then, and Finn was both its subject and object’ (pp. 45–50). His love for Finn confuses him, forcing him to wonder ‘what I was’ (p. 83). His dilemma is that he does not


know how to understand the feelings he has for Finn and whether his longing and desire constitute a queer subjectivity. He imagines himself eulogised as ‘an incompetent, sexually suspect cretin’ (p. 58) but also as someone whose ‘tangle of emotions’ confuse him and are inexplicable in terms of what ‘I generally understood about sex’ (p. 83). He never uses the word ‘gay’ to describe his feelings or longing for Finn. In this way, the text suspends homosexuality as a status of identification. And this suspended state invites us to read the What I Was as a queer text, as it foregrounds desire as complex and the binaries such as masculine/ feminine and hetero/homosexuality as unstable. The narrator’s self-referential queer performativity is entirely a selfish one and despite his need to be with, and be like, Finn. He assumes the role of a voyeur, watching and studying Finn with intense interest, memorising ‘his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought’ (p. 113). But this scrutinising has a selfserving purpose as what he wants is to see himself through Finn’s eyes, sifting and distilling the most interesting bits so that he will become ‘a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself’ (p. 113). Thus, his fantasy of becoming a better version of himself is based on an impossible merger. His trips to the hut are not just an escape from an unexciting environment to a more exciting one. Rather, they can be understood as an opportunity to eschew intersubjective relations at school. The narrator refuses to let another boy, Reese, join him in his visits to the hut, despite his pleading and threats to disclose his clandestine meetings to the other boys. Alone with Finn, he natters incessantly in Finn’s quiet company, and brings food and supplies. He enjoys the time with Finn more for what he can gain from him than what he can bring to the relationship. Finn, on the other hand, asks for nothing from the relationship and it is his indifference which spurs the narrator to please him more and to attain an indispensable status: ‘I was Scheherazade, desperate to keep him amused’ (p. 26). The narrator’s desire to please Finn and become more desirable to him is an inversion of the male gaze phenomenon. This desire in becoming other drives his motivations to visit Finn, his observations, and ultimately his citations of acts that Finn performs. In this way, the narrator is a queer subject whose performatives do not conform to hegemonic sexual and gender norms. His alterity is therefore structured by a narcissistic and specular absorption in the other that is both within and without. When he spends the Easter break with Finn, he imagines himself physically morphing to look more like Finn, and although there is no mirror in the hut, he nevertheless notes ‘I could look at him

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and imagine myself each day growing taller and slimmer and bolder’ (p. 120). When Finn becomes ill, he is unable to interpret the blood on the sheets as a sign of menstruation. Rather he panics and takes flight, despite his previous avowal ‘I will be the one to care’ (p. 60, emphasis in original). So strong is his self-absorption that he fails to see Finn other than in the terms of his own self-legitimising narrative of authority that can only confer recognition based on sameness. To see Finn as a girl is not possible for him as Finn’s physical body, clothing, independent lifestyle, and performativity are evidence in his eyes that Finn is naturally a boy and serve the a posteriori justification of his sexual identity. Later, on a visit to see Finn in hospital when the narrator discovers that she is really a girl, he notes ‘a wave of something dark flooded the space behind my eyes’ (p. 172). Does the ‘something dark’ represent the mobilising of a lurking fear of his repressed homosexuality? When he leaves he informs us ‘Finn turned away and all of a sudden the hilarity of the situation struck me with force’ (p. 172). Is this ‘rising bubble of hysteria’ (p. 172) he tries to control metonymic of a dark comic moment in the realisation of his naïve blindness to the visible evidence of Finn’s gender? The text refuses a fixed and single denotation, thereby lending a queer possibility which opens it up to multiple interpretations. Some time after being released into the custody of his parents after escaping charges of manslaughter over the death of Reese and sexual perversity with an underaged girl, the narrator abandons his middleclass path of a good education and returns to Finn’s abandoned and storm-ravaged hut. He takes possession of the hut, slowly rebuilding it as he corporeally transforms himself into the skilled and capable Finn, ambiguously expressing that he was ‘becoming what I loved’ (p. 180). Years later when he meets a young woman at the market, he tells her ‘My name is Finn’ (p. 197). The various texts I have discussed in this chapter engage with the discontents that arise from narratives that deal with the complexity of identity and representations that question normality, difference, and diversity across human and animal communities. My selection has been purposeful as I have looked for texts that avoid the temptation to resort to simplistic reductive binaries. Rather, I have argued that these texts (and others that space won’t allow me to include) open up queer spaces into which we can see different configurations of the world: configurations which might be familiar or foreign depending on our own circumstances. In applying a queer reading to these texts, I have already expressed a willingness to take up the preferred subject positions they offer. However, as I have attempted to demonstrate, we can still probe


‘spaces’ within the texts to ask questions that the texts might raise or not concerning how subjectivities are discursively constructed. Hall invites readers to become ‘queer agents’ by ‘destabilizing received notions of sexual normality and differential valuations, seeing diverse possibilities for identifications and affiliations, opening up questions about how to imagine a future of different sexual expressions and subject positions’ (2003, p. 168). Several of the texts in this chapter are themselves the ‘queer agents’ as they have characteristics that make them amenable to queer analysis. Whether one chooses to take up the invitations offered by the texts, queer theories, like feminist and post-structuralist theories, provide us with a way of adopting a readerly position whereby we might see spaces within a text for subverting or resisting a dominant discourse or preferred subject positions. Maybe if ‘all the world is queer’ without exception, then at least we could consider the possibility of liberating identity from the constraints and limitations imposed by binaries and hierarchies. Or would a new queer order mean a new orthodoxy would emerge: one that refuses to question its own grand narrative?

5 No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender

When the same experience that moves one of us to pity is simultaneously moving everyone else to laughter, we may be sure there is something at work, some underlying dynamic, that can reduce us equally to laughter or tears. (La Farge, 2004) If you were a boy, having a sense of humor meant pouring salt on the head of the girl who sat in front of you to make it look as though she has dandruff. If you were a girl, having a sense of humor meant laughing when someone poured salt on your head. (Comedy writer, Anne Beatts, in Barreca 1992) Gender is a topic which is often the subject for comedic treatment in plays, literature, film, and in stand-up comedy. Kathleen Rowe notes: ‘Almost all comedic forms – from jokes to gags to slapstick routines to the most complex narrative structures – attempt a liberation from authority’ (1995, p. 44). While comedy’s liberatory side can offer transgressive and political takes on authority, it can also be reactionary and discriminatory in both delivery and content. In terms of comedy’s ability to be transgressive, liberatory, reactionary, and discriminatory what does this form offer us in understanding dilemmas we have been exploring in this book? To put a different spin on Rowe’s comment, comedy often pulls at the pants of authority hoping to expose what authority seeks to hide behind, and, in so doing, it delights in breaking taboos, subverting convention, exposing hypocrisy, and shocking its audience. It can instead serve a more repressive purpose by consolidating 156

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dominant ideologies, endorsing stereotypes, and causing injury and harm. This double-edged possibility is what La Farge notes in the epigraph that heads this chapter. Comedy as a dramatic/theatrical genre is an ancient form that goes back to at least Aristophanes in the fifth century BC, and many early comic themes continue to find their way into contemporary popular culture, such as those found in the number of Shakespearean-inspired films targeting youth audiences.1 However, this chapter covers a more limited range of contemporary comic texts produced for children and young adults. Children’s literature has delivered different forms of comedy over many decades, with the distinct purpose to amuse and delight, or, as Rod McGillis notes, to ‘delight in the impolite’, with respect to the continuing interest in scatological and gross humour in contemporary children’s texts (2003, p. 184). However, despite this tradition, which draws on the carnivalesque, many children’s books limit the excesses of this comic mode because of the various restrictions that inevitably shape the genre. For example, in her discussion of anal jokes found in a trilogy of ‘bum stories’ for children by Australian writer Andy Griffiths – The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001) (retitled The Day My Butt Went Psycho for the USA market), Zombie Bums from Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005) – Alice Mills argues that while these books are ‘carnivalesque in their anality, they lack the rich variety of excess that carnival promotes, its licensed revelry in eating, drinking, sex and obscene language’ (2008, p. 79). While many children and adults may find these forms of humour funny, a double standard emerges when adults want to censor such comedy where they occur in children’s books. But there is a dilemma with calling foul play when one feels that a double standard is operating in jokes and other forms of comedy that rely on sexual, gender, or ethnic-based targets (among others). In order words, we need to ask ourselves: When does provocative humour that targets gender and sexuality (and other human attributes) vitiate a text’s potential to do positive political work? The answer lies in the double-edged possibility of comedy mentioned above. However, whether texts provoke laughter or tears, pull at our emotions or conscience, shock or amuse, comic conventions are often used to convey a profoundly serious (if not solemn) view of human existence. Even in serious texts, comic moments may emerge for the purpose of contrast or to provide readers with some momentary respite. For children, humour can reside in language play – puns, spoonerisms, riddles, and jokes. It can also be provoked by slapstick, exaggeration, parody, and the absurd. The range of possibilities is similar to those

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elements that appeal to adults, but with perhaps a slightly different slant or delivery (see Mallan, 1993). All literature and film are like a palimpsest in that every new text overlays and overwrites previous ones in a process of rewriting and revisioning. The source for humour in a text involves an inevitable borrowing and redelivery of comic ideas, events, and characters from other texts. This process of intertextuality is clearly apparent in some of the examples in this chapter, which open up possibilities to explore their relationships with other texts through adaptation, allusion, parody, and other comic and non-comic styles and devices. When a book is turned into a film, Hutcheon regards the process (and the product) as a ‘kind of extended palimpsest, and, at the same time, often a transcoding into a different set of conventions’ (2006, p. 33). The example of She’s the Man (2006) discussed in this chapter illustrates how this contemporary Hollywood film ‘transcodes’ Shakespeare’s earlier text Twelfth Night. Rewriting, however, is not just a matter of recycling old jokes or comic plots, but reflects more the way in which contemporary examples of children’s literature and film, discussed in this chapter at least, tend to engage with issues of social critique, often via a circuitous route. Issues that impact on gender, such as consumerism, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, and difference, are given a non-didactic treatment that relies on extratextual and metatextual considerations, in terms of how the text, or in some cases its pretext or intertext, stands within a culture. While the metatextual has connections with the intertextual in that both can be self-referential and selfreflective, the extratextual in its reference to the ‘real’ world often carries an ideological statement (see Whiteside & Issacharoff, 1987). The nondidactic approach extends to how comic strategies may provide indirect social criticism rather than proffer a more didactic, polemical project. For instance, in rewriting and re-presenting Twelfth Night for contemporary teenage audiences, She’s the Man similarly concerns itself with how social structures and choices affect gender performativity. Teenage pregnancy in the film Juno uses humour as part of its extratextual considerations with respect to provisional and contradictory social and moral concerns about teenage sexuality and female agency. Furthermore, the children’s film The Cat in the Hat (2003) parodies consumerism by mocking the commodity narrative and its influence on children and adults as gendered subjects while also playfully participating in that narrative through its own excessive humour and self-referential style of visual and verbal wit. Revisioning offers us a way to imagine life and its situations differently, to see difference not as something that needs to be marginalised or valorised but as a feature with its own desires and playful pleasures. I discussed


desire and pleasure early in the book and noted the dilemmas associated with female subjectivity and viewing pleasure especially with respect to the (masculine) gaze and social norms that frame desire (see Introduction and Chapter 1). Here I revisit desire, but from the standpoint of comic interpretation. When texts use camp and other playful strategies (such as ‘kinging’) they can revision gender hierarchies and sexual norms by revealing the ‘porousness of pleasure, its locally overlapping features of passivity and activity, affirmation and critique’ (Robertson, 1996, p. 16). As Robertson notes with respect to camp, it is a ‘guilty pleasure’ in that while it has the capacity to negotiate these extremes, it is also contradictory in that its ‘pleasures of alienation and absorption’ (p. 17) with respect to the dominant will always offer different subject positions for audiences. In terms of children’s literature, this problem of alienation from and absorption/assimilation in the social order is manifested in the rhetorical devices a text employs such as irony and satire. An accusation often levelled at irony is that it is elitist and while Hutcheon (1995, p. 47) maintains it tries to be inclusive, it cannot guarantee that its intended audience will necessarily get it by appreciating the dilemmas that irony reflects (Hall, 1994). This situation extends to other forms of humorous intent and works both for and against child and youth audiences. Whereas some texts may be seen as going over the heads of children, others may have huge appeal to a youth demographic, but may be regarded by adults as crass or highly offensive. These responses by different discourse communities invariably emerge when children’s and YA texts push at the boundaries of mainstream (adult) sensitivity. Therefore, the contradiction that exists within the text and between text and reception is the crux of comedy as noted by La Farge and as I argue in this chapter. This contradiction comes with the territory comedy attempts to retrace and remap. This overview offers a context for examining how various forms of the comic (parody, satire, the grotesque, and so on) illuminate the dynamic of gender and sexuality at play in the narratives. By reading the serio-comic elements through theories of performativity, queer, and other strategies we can think about the ambivalent pleasures the texts offer and whether they destabilise and/or maintain the social norms and organisation of gender.

Happily ever after and the crises of heterosexuality In this section I examine a film, She’s the Man (2006), and a picture book, The Race of the Century (Downard, 2008) as examples of comic texts that are useful for considering the parodic aspects of gender,

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particularly with respect to the constructedness of heterosexual identities. From Butler’s perspective in Gender Trouble (1990a, pp. 136–8), parodic performances such as drag reveal the imitative qualities of all gender identities. In texts that employ drag or play up ‘a camp sensibility’ (Sontag, 1966), humour derives from the ways in which the gay/straight, male/female character disrupts the sex–gender relationship by highlighting the disjunction between performer and performance. In other words, there is a disjunction between the body of the performer and the gender that is being performed. The pleasure in the incongruous, that camp/drag humour flaunts, offers viewers/ readers a momentary release from the seemingly immutable laws of heteronormativity; that is, the norms that compel us to conform to hegemonic, heterosexual norms of identity. Parody can be effective for persuading us to reconsider conventional stereotypes and to this end children’s writers have rewritten traditional fairytales inverting gender stereotypes and showing up the folly of gender norms. But these parodies (and others) often reinforce existing heterosexual power structures and binaries. The film, Mrs Doubtfire (based on the novel by Anne Fine, Alias, Madame Doubtfire) is another example (see Flanagan, 2007). Heterosexuality is often the subject and object of the humour; in particular, crises of heterosexuality often drive the narratives. However, in examining these crises our attention is drawn to how the subjects are represented (the cross-dresser and the ‘straights’) and who is the butt of the comedy (for example, the ‘sissy’ or the ‘wimp’). Cross-dressing and the inevitable incongruity and disruption to heterosexuality give rise to the comic pleasures in the teen film She’s the Man. The opening and closing screen credits to She’s the Man note that this film was ‘inspired by Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare’ (emphasis in original): inspired maybe, but definitely not a faithful adaptation. The film uses the character names and central plot conceit of a young woman (Viola) who cross-dresses to disguise herself as her twin brother (Sebastian) as its link to Shakespeare’s comedy. The motivation for Viola’s cross-dressing is that by pretending to be a boy she might be selected to play on her brother’s high school football team; the reason being that her school refuses to allow mixed-gender teams. Both texts use female-to-male cross-dressing as a means to explore gender discrimination and hierarchy. For those who are familiar with Twelfth Night, the film provides points of recognition as familiar names are not only attributed to the characters (Viola, Duke Orsino, Olivia, Sebastian, Toby, Maria), but also to the school (Illyria Preparatory High) and a tarantula


(named Malvolio). However, my interest here is not to compare the two texts. Rather, I focus on comic disruptions of masculinity and the restoration of the narrative convention of the happy ending. There are four physical spaces in the film where masculinity is defined in oppositional terms to femininity and which provide comic moments – the dormitory, the gym, the bathroom, and the soccer field. Each of these spaces entails a visual humour that enables us to see them as provocative sites/sights of cultural contestation. When Viola, dressed in her brother’s school uniform, a short, boyish wig, false eyebrows and sideburns, makes her way for the first time into the boys’ dorm at her brother’s new school, Illyria, she encounters a space that is coded masculine in numerous ways, but specifically in terms of chaos. She moves with caution and fear down a long corridor as boys throw footballs and Frisbees, play hockey, shout, run, jostle, and move with speed and agility. This overt performance of an active and loud masculinity is at odds with the restrained and silent presence of Viola/Sebastian. Viola mugs fear of these feral boys as she walks slowly, with her belongings clutched closely to her chest, and eyes wide open on high alert. As viewers know that Viola is only pretending to be Sebastian, this scene appears to provide visual ‘evidence’ that an active, chaotic masculinity and a restrained and controlled femininity constitute ‘natural’ behaviours and demonstrate Butler’s (1990a) idea of the performative construction of gender. While femininity is officially and visually under erasure by virtue of the exclusionary policy of a boys-only dorm, Viola’s real presence reinserts femininity through the guise of a cross-dressing interloper. She thereby occupies a queer space that threatens the stability and exclusionary system of apparently dominant heteronormativity. This threat is comically foreshadowed in this early scene, but is fully realised more seriously by the time the narrative reaches closure. In another scene, Viola as Sebastian pretends to work out at the gym with Duke, who benchpresses 225lb weights. While Viola disguises her body with baggy track pants and top, Duke displays his musculature with a sleeveless white T-shirt and shorts. His body’s tone and shape are emphasised by both the impressive weightlifting and the light glistening of perspiration on his arms. Viola fakes effort and weightlifting, and secretly gazes at Duke’s body. The visual contrast between the two bodies as they ‘work out’ parodies the image of the male bodybuilder while at the same time reinforcing a distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’, and ‘real’ and ‘fake’ masculinities. Olivia, who is also at the gym, looks not at Duke, but directs her gaze at Viola/Sebastian, who is the object of her desire. Therefore, Duke is the male object of Viola’s

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gaze and desire, and Viola/Sebastian is the ‘male’ object of Olivia’s gaze, with the result that two ‘male’ bodies are the focus of a female gaze. The twist is that Viola is doubly coded as both male and female and as such contests the stable, bodily identity. As the gaze is simultaneously female and queer, it repudiates the prerogative of the male gaze and heterosexuality, and in this it is not different from Shakespeare’s story. In Hollywood realist cinema, Mulvey has argued that the male gaze structures the look of the viewer and allows the male spectator to identify with activity in the scene and to desire the female who is the object of his gaze and desire. The usurping of the traditional male gaze by Olivia and Viola is reinforced in a locker room scene when Viola finds herself surrounded by semi-naked boys as they prepare to shower after a soccer match. In both instances, the girls enjoy watching the boys, and the to-be-looked-at-ness shifts from the female body to the male body. The viewer is positioned to sympathise with Viola’s predicament through the camera’s high angle which situates her in a submissive (seated and still) position to the dominant (standing and moving) position of the boys. Her seated position also means that her line of sight is level with the boys’ genitalia and (bare) bottoms. However, our viewing subject position is also inflected with an inevitable voyeuristic and anticipatory element that informs our enjoyment of this scene – what if a towel slipped! Despite living in the boys’ dorm and sharing a room with Duke, Viola manages to avoid being naked, which would obviously give the game away. She sneaks into the communal bathroom when the other boys are asleep and is able to wash in the open space of the showers without detection. The bathroom is another typically coded masculine space as the showers do not have curtains or doors. As a public (exposed) space, the bathroom is a place where ‘real’ men’s bodies are on display, setting up the body as open to the (homo)erotic desire of the spectator (both within and outside the text). By transforming the bathroom into a private (secret) space whereby she can shower without her disguise, Viola legitimises the fact that she is not a ‘real’ man, but the film tantalises the viewer with the possibility of being a voyeur (as we were in the locker room scene). She also breaks down the gender binary that enforces inclusion/exclusion, albeit via secrecy and concealment (e.g. she uses a chest binder to flatten and conceal her breasts). Her actions become similar to gay males who have to ‘pass’ as heterosexual in order to appear part of normative heterosexuality. However, another bathroom scene complicates the constructed status of this space as a gendered zone.


Viola (as herself ) reluctantly attends a function aimed at grooming girls to be debutantes. Olivia is also at the function, so too is Monique, (the real) Sebastian’s jealous and recently dumped girlfriend. Neither Olivia nor Monique is aware of the double role Viola has been playing. At one point, Olivia and Viola are in the stylishly decorated female toilets (bathroom) touching up their make-up and combing their hair. This feminine activity is carried out as part of the ‘normal’ behaviour of girls. However, when Monique enters the room a fight ensues after she accuses Olivia of trying to steal her boyfriend Sebastian. The two girls, dressed in feminine clothes and high heels, engage in a pull-down, drag-out fight. They kick, punch, slap, pull, throw objects, and yell at each other. Viola actively participates in the fray in an effort to restrain Monique. The soundtrack of the ‘March of the Toreadores’ from Bizet’s Carmen provides a lively accompaniment to match the physical excesses of the girls. When the horrified coordinator of the function enters the bathroom and pulls the girls apart, she quickly regains her decorum and tells them in a soft but instructive tone: ‘When debutantes disagree they say it with their eyes’. In order to fully appreciate this scene, we need to put it in the context of the debutante function. Prior to the bathroom brawl, women and girls are seated at tables that are beautifully laid out with fine crockery, wine glasses, and silver in an expensive-looking hotel function room. The refined and well-groomed female coordinator addresses the group and tells them that debutantes must make ‘graceful, ladylike entrées’, a nice unintended pun, perhaps, given the double meaning as entrance and a kind of dish. At this point, Viola arrives late, crashing through the doors, knocking people as she takes off her denim jacket, and flops into a chair with her back to the speaker. During the meal, she gnaws at a chicken leg, wipes her face with the back of her hand, and generally behaves as the antithesis of the debutante ideal. These two scenes of girls behaving badly transgress feminine decorum and in so doing can be seen as appropriating masculine behaviour at its worst. While the girls’ indecorum invokes disgust and puzzlement among the spectators at the function, it provides a comic moment for the viewing audience. The transformations of femininity into a spectacle of disgust and a feminine space into a fight zone are the provenance of the grotesque and unruly masculinity. By turning the tables on decorum and order, the girls (Viola, Olivia, and Monique) create a carnivalesque space, in a Bakhtinian sense, where chaos rules momentarily before order is restored. This form of chaos is different from the one that Viola first encountered in the boys’ dorm. In that scene, we

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were positioned to see the chaos of the boys’ behaviour through Viola’s eyes, whereas from the boys’ perspective it was possibly just a normal course of events. By contrast, the carnivalesque scene in the bathroom has girls as the object of our viewing gaze and this offers contradictory positions. Girls’ fighting is often described in ways that diminish their ability for aggressive behaviour, through terms such as ‘cat fight’ that connote name calling, hair pulling, and nail scratching – not the stuff of a ‘real’ (man’s) fight! However, the intensity of these girls’ fight, with its more conventional throwing of punches to the stomach, dirty tricks, and abusive language, sets this fight scene apart from cat fight imagery, yet there is no obvious physical harm inflicted – no blood, no broken noses, no chipped teeth. The camera denies any overt sexual titillation by not showing ripped blouses, underwear, or exposed flesh. However, the frequent shots of the girls’ stiletto heels as an anchor to grab and pull a girl along the floor, or to hurl at someone’s head, queers the fight by rewriting and remixing conventional performatives of masculinity and femininity. Arthurs argues that ‘women are still regarded as the moral guardians of society whose behaviour must set the standard for men, acting as a kind of generalized super ego for the unruly id of the masculine psyche’ (1999, p. 141). For this reason, she contends that comedy provides an important space for the expression of ‘female fantasies of physical aggression’ (p. 141). By displaying female aggression under the name of comedy, audiences laugh in the same way that slapstick can evoke a humorous response. It seems safe and contained, and no blood is spilled. The final space I want to focus on in this film is the soccer field, which provides the opening and original site of the gender dilemma in the film and the closing resolution and happy ending. The soccer field is another site of cultural contestation and contradiction. (There are parallels with Bend It Like Beckham, which I discussed in Chapter 1.) When Viola and her girlfriends were first told by the coach at her school that there would be no female soccer team because of a lack of numbers, Viola suggests that the girls join the boys’ team. Her suggestion is met with ridicule and refusal by the coach, and Viola’s boyfriend ( Justin), the captain of the team, agrees with the coach and his team mates that it is not a good idea because girls could get hurt. It is this rejection and her brother’s subterfuge of going secretly to London for two weeks with his rock band, while ostensibly staying at his father’s home, that provide the motivation for Viola to disguise herself as Sebastian and win a place on the soccer team at his new school Illyria. Aided by Paul, her hairdressing gay friend (yes, the stereotypes are rife), Viola is transformed


into Sebastian and learns how to do masculinity – she struts, lowers her voice, spits, slaps boys on the back, is loud, and occasionally grabs her crotch. However, her arrival in the dorm, described previously, is an incidence where the performance slips and she struggles to maintain her control. Ironically, it is a gay friend who is able to teach her how to perform hegemonic masculinity with a convincing authenticity, and ‘brings into relief’, in Butler’s words, ‘the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original’ (1990a, p. 41). However, these illusory surfaces, which are intended to give ‘real’ substance to masculine subjectivity, are a façade that not only protects Viola from being exposed as a fraud, but also protects other boys who feel compelled to perform the gestures and acts of masculinity in ways that are normative and acceptable within the school community. When Viola (as Sebastian) tries out for the Illyria soccer team she is no match for the boys. She avoids losing her cover by explaining to the coach that she has to be ‘a shirt’ player rather than a bare-chested one because she is allergic to the sun. But she struggles to keep up the pace and stamina that the boys seem to effortlessly maintain throughout the trial. Consequently, she is relegated to ‘second string’, missing a place on the team. Her failed athleticism is by association a failed masculinity as the other second strings are fat, short, or sissy-looking. However, she is able to recoup her ‘masculinity’ with the help of Paul, who organises for Viola’s girlfriends to pretend to be former lovers of Sebastian. Before Duke and his friends at a restaurant, the girls publicly perform their desire for ‘Sebastian’, who acts tough and detached. As the boys watch in amazement at the girls’ display of sexual attraction towards Sebastian, they realise that there must be more to him than meets the eye. Of course, the double irony is that the perceived discrepancy between appearance and reality is an incongruity arising from the juxtaposition of different performatives – between heterosexual and queer, and between ostensibly serious and actually comic. After proving he has what it takes (with the girls), ‘Sebastian’ is treated like a hero as word spreads quickly of his sexual prowess. When Paul tells Viola ‘remember inside every girl there’s a boy’ the words ring with both sexual innuendo and gender ambiguity. Although the converse idea that ‘inside every boy there’s a girl’ would perhaps be more threatening to normativity, and have less comic potential. Hutcheon notes that interpreting irony requires ‘a rapid oscillation between the said and the unsaid’ (1995, p. 60), so that ‘our minds almost can experience both readings at the same time’ (pp. 50–60). In this and other narrative moments, we engage in this rapid oscillation and experience

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the double take that comes with the gender bending as it threatens hegemony’s stability. The soccer field is also presented as a Gothic space where vulnerable femininity is subjected to an aggressive and threatening masculinity. This is given vivid acknowledgement in a nightmare Viola has where she is playing soccer in the hyper-feminine, voluminous, pink ball gown that her mother purchased in the hope that her daughter would fulfil her dream (not Viola’s) of being a debutante. The dreamscape has the game played against the backdrop of a nightmarish, night sky. Soccer boys – flying, falling, crushing – dominate the screen in close-up while Viola in high heels and her full-length dress with numerous layers of netting negotiates her way across the muddy field. When she kicks the ball, she somersaults, landing hard on her back. This slapstick moment brings the game and the nightmare to an end. Unlike the emotional and psychological dimension that readers and characters often encounter in the comic Gothic text, the comic working in this scene does not ameliorate Viola’s fears, rather it confirms them. For viewers, the farcical playing out of Viola in flight and fright offers a perverse viewing pleasure. As the skies open up, a heavy shower brings her to consciousness. However, her awakening is caused by a jug of water thrown on her face by a group of dorm boys as the prelude to an initiation ceremony. The boys are decked out in masks and perform savage-like behaviour (feral masculinity), harassing and tormenting a group of new students. They cover them with a sticky substance and demand that they strip off their pyjamas. Once again Viola escapes exposure and manages to set off the fire alarm and sprinklers. This moment of triumph for Viola provides a comic reductio ad absurdum of hegemonic masculinity’s claim to superiority that both parts of the nightmare/reality assert. The climax of the story is the soccer match, but there are the predictable ploys that delay resolution and the inevitable happy ending. The real Sebastian returns and finds himself playing soccer on the team, despite the fact that, unlike his sister, he is a hopeless player. The Headmaster interrupts play to tell the crowd over the loudspeaker that Sebastian is really a girl not a boy, a fact that he has been revealed to him by another boy. However, he is forced to retract this statement when Sebastian in front of everyone lowers his pants – his apparently impressive sexual toolkit causes the crowd to gasp and his father to comment proudly ‘that’s my boy’. After Viola manages to replace her brother on the field, there is the inevitable ‘coming out’ whereby she exposes her breasts to an equally appreciative audience to prove her femininity. The double exposure provides visible proof of gender


difference, and while it does not resignify gendered bodies, it does facilitate the resignification of the soccer field and the game’s privileging of masculinity. The tough hypermasculine Illyria High coach (who looks as if he has stepped off the set of a Spike Lee film) declares that Viola can play on the team, overruling Viola’s school coach who continues to object. The original coach, who trains the opposing team, presents a more urbane masculinity with his full head of hair, stylish clothes, and well-modulated voice, as opposed to the other coach’s shaved head, black clothes, fierce expression, and rough manner of speech. The decision by the llyria coach for gender equality on the soccer field suggests a transformation of gender relations, or, at least in this film, a happy ending. However, there is a final ambivalent note. When he shouts ‘Let’s play some football,’ he says under his breath and with a clearly exasperated expression, ‘Like a bunch of girls.’ Such use of language to denigrate boys who don’t measure up to an elusive masculine ideal is peppered throughout She’s the Man as the coach calls the soccer boys ‘girls’, ‘nancy boys’, and ‘runts’. While the language is intended to make the underachieving boys strive harder, it also discursively (and paradoxically) hails a masculine subjectivity into being by saying what it is not. The vulnerability of the male body and, in particular, the ironic discrepancy between maleness and the performance of masculinity is what I now consider through the idea of ‘kinging’. My discussion draws on Judith Halberstam’s (2001) work on king comedies as a specific tradition of masculine humour. Halberstam distinguishes king from camp by arguing that ‘king comedy attempts to exploit not the power but the frailty of the male body for the purpose of generating laughs at the hero’s expense’ (p. 426). While king comedies are located in the stand-up comedy circuit of queer clubs, Halberstam demonstrates how mainstream films often can be read as king comedies or at the very least as having ‘king’ effects or traces. She uses the example of comic characters such as Woody Allen, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers as providing moments of king humour through their representations of male frailty or stupidity embodied in the bumbling, weak, or vulnerable male who is often paired or contrasted with a more robust male. While camp humour mimics femininity in order to produce drag performances that Butler (1990a) sees as demonstrating the imitative nature of all gender identities through parody, ‘“kinging” reads dominant male masculinity and explodes its effects through exaggeration, parody and earnest mimicry’ (Halberstam, 2001, p. 428).

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The Race of the Century (2008), a picture book by Barry Downard, offers several king moments in its retelling of the fable of The Hare and the Tortoise. The book’s title page sets the scene for oppositional masculinities, when the foreground figure of Flash Harry the Hare looks out at the reader and gestures with his thumb to a label with the words ‘Twinkle Toes’ that appears across the background figure of a glum-looking Tom Tortoise. Tom sees this put-down of his masculinity as ‘the last straw’ so he challenges Harry to a race. The pairing of a tortoise and a hare in the tradition of the fable is intended to provide children with a lesson in the value of caution and determination over haste and complacency. The text gives this lesson a different treatment by parodying masculinity in oppositional terms of ‘fast and flashy’ and ‘slow and steady’. This incongruous pairing of Harry and Tom resonates with the Abbott and Costello comedy duo in terms of the different male bodies (lean/round) and masculine styles (urbane/unkempt, or in this text, flashy/stodgy). The king effect can be seen in this text through what Halberstam terms ‘de-authentication’. Flash Harry adopts various muscle poses to demonstrate his authenticity as the real thing – we see his trim, taut, and lean body from all angles as he flexes his muscles (and his butt). These poses are enhanced by his sleeveless, tight-fitting T-shirt with the words ‘Bunnies dig me’ emblazoned on the back. His name with a gold crown on the front of the T-shirt signifies that he is the king. But these signs of maleness and authenticity carry a parodic significance that undermines the claims to authenticity. Harry’s pink T-shirt, tight-fitting blue pants, and poses invoke a homoerotic aesthetic, despite his posturing as a heterosexual stud. This aesthetic is further deconstructed in the illustration that shows Harry from behind. The inscription on his T-shirt (‘Bunnies dig me’) is a linguistic pun that plays on his hybrid man-animal body as an object of female desire. The illustration extends the double meaning as Harry’s exposed tail outside his pants mimics Hugh Heffner’s female playboy bunnies. The effect is a camp sensibility that undermines any claim to heterosexual masculinity (see Figure 5.1). As Butler explains in The Psychic Life of Power, becoming a ‘man’ requires repudiating femininity by showing sexual desire as elaborating the difference between male and female (Butler, 1997b, p. 32). The ambivalent images of Harry Hare do not provide sufficient proof of that difference. Both Harry and Tom attempt to replicate dominant masculinity within the system of performativity. In preparing for the race, Tom as the straight guy in the duo, lifts weights with pumpkins at each end,


Figure 5.1 From The Race of the Century by Barry Downard, reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

and a carrot inducement dangles above his head. Harry, on the other hand, works out at the disco, impersonating John Travolta’s whitesuited character in Saturday Night Fever (see Figure 5.2). This image of the disco-dancing stud parodies a white masculinity through its impersonation of an ageing sex idol. Halberstam makes a similar point with respect to drag-king humour that parodies ‘latter-day sex gods (like Tom Jones or Elvis or Donny Osmond)’ by emphasising the ‘prosthetic nature of male sexual appeal by using overstuffed

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Figure 5.2 From The Race of the Century by Barry Downard, reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

crotches, chest rugs, and wigs’ (2001, p. 433). Working with this imagery, Harry’s ‘counterfeit’ masculinity (a term Halberstam coins) lies in the composition of the photo montage illustration with its use of fake fur and other material to construct the body of Harry (and on his autographed flyers there are repeated images of a significant bulge in his crotch). Furthermore, Harry’s swinging gold crown necklace can be read as an accessory that signifies his real (or imagined) sex appeal, but the crown necklace may cover a phallic lack. While the text provides no proof of this, it does nevertheless offer clues that suggest this could be a valid reading. For instance, there are several visual and verbal references to carrots as possible phallic substitutes: a sign proclaims: ‘Carrots give you GO! CARROTSRUS’; Harry is seen either with a carrot


in hand or with carrots close by his body. Towards the end of the race, a snoozing Harry, decked out in matching pink socks, pink open sandals and a pink T-shirt lies on the grass with his hands behind his head, and one leg crossed over the other. This penultimate image of Harry in pink coupled with his loss of the race to a marginalised masculine subject can be read as signifying his lack of phallic pre-eminence. While Harry might be a hero in his own imagination, he is a loser in this story, at least on this occasion. The happy ending with the smiling and triumphant Tom Tortoise may only be temporary as the sign he holds high above his head in the final image offers an ambivalent statement of victory: Flash Harry Hare Has Bad Hare Day! “Race of the Century” (2008, unpaged) Is it simply a case of hare today, gone tomorrow? Or is the win just a flash in the pan for Tom? A crisis of heterosexuality is given a different kind of comic treatment in the children’s novel, Tumble Turn (2003) by Australian author Doug MacLeod, a seasoned writer of humorous children’s books and Australian television comedy shows. Twelve-year-old Dominic Dear is a protogay character who is worried that he is not ‘normal’ (a ‘looper’) as he likes to see his best friend Crystal (Christopher) Ball without his shirt on or in his underpants. In one of the numerous email exchanges to his Uncle Peri that comprise the story, he worries that: ‘Boys are not meant to think of things like this’ (p. 30). Just as we saw the gay character Paul facilitating Viola’s transformation of gender appearance and performativity in She’s the Man, in Tumble Turn, Uncle Peri, Dominic’s gay uncle, provides him with reassurance and advice in response to his many concerns and anxieties about his sexuality, his parents, his sister, and his transitory infatuations with his teacher (Ms Havercroft) and other male and female friends. Uncle Peri’s appearance at the Family Therapy session that Dominic and his parents attend facilitates narrative resolution and attempts resolution of the crisis of heterosexuality. By closure, Dominic’s sexuality remains ambivalent, still in a state of becoming. For instance, he speaks of a new Turkish girl who ‘looks exotic and interesting’ (p. 151), but comments

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that Dart (a male friend), despite his small size, ‘still looks good in bathers’ (p. 153). Accompanying this ambiguity of Dominic’s sexuality, Peri’s final email to Dominic (and the implied readers) questions the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality and endorses a system of tolerance and enlightenment that does not foreclose other possibilities: A lot of people will tell you there is only one way to live your life. You must have a wife and children and a car with a cup-holder. These things are lovely but they don’t suit everyone. You may end up with a beautiful wife and children and a car with a cup-holder and be wonderfully happy. You may end up living in an igloo with a Japanese string quartet and also be wonderfully happy. You may even end up climbing volcanoes with the great love of your life. What ever happens in your life, keep an open mind. (p 151) The theme of tolerance and acceptance of different sexualities and lifestyles that is central to Tumble Turn resonates with mainstream comedies for adult audiences such as The Birdcage (1996) and Kinky Boots (2005).2 The happy endings of these films and, to a certain extent of Tumble Turn, offer a viewing pleasure that draws from the temporary disruption to heterosexuality and the vicarious trespassing across hegemonic borders for gender and sexuality. However, by closure, demarcations are reconstituted but hopefully transformed into more tolerant zones of difference and understanding. This point was explored in the previous chapter in discussions of Parrotfish, Finding Nemo, and Odd Bird Out. In raising the possibility of a protogay sexuality for Dominic, Tumble Turn also parodies male insufficiency through the figures of Dominic, his father, and his friend Dart (D’artagnon). In this respect, the text can be read as a form of king comedy with much of its humour centring on male anxiety and vulnerability. Dominic worries about his body – ‘I am a short fat boy’ (p. 2), and although he is told he has an IQ of 75 and his mother says he has ‘learning difficulties’, he wants to be ‘a famous TV producer with a glamorous show-business wife’ (p. 2). However, his unsuccessful attempts to impress girls and his disappointment about his body cause him to comment on several occasions that he probably will never marry, evading the issue of his possible gay sexuality. His father, Archy (Archibald), is going through a mid-life crisis, his name becoming a cruel reminder of his increasing hair loss. At one point


he purchases a toupee but his wife ridicules him telling him he looks ‘like a middle-aged pop star’ (p. 39). Consequently, he decides to take it back to the store and get a refund. Archy has a short-lived ‘mad love affair’ with Dominic’s teacher, Ponch Havercroft, a move that gives further testimony to his attempt to live out his adolescent fantasies. By the close of the story, Archy is living alone in a hotel room and presents a melancholic figure. Dominic describes D’artagnon (Dart) as ‘a strange pixie-like’ boy ‘who never speaks a word’ (p. 43), and he has the highest IQ score of anyone in the class. Both boys are sent to the same psychiatrist to sort out their problems, namely, Dart’s elective mutism and Dominic’s perceived gay sexuality (and the fact that he ate Ms Havercroft’s chalk when he found out about the affair). Halberstam notes that ‘while psychoanalysis has usefully detailed the forms and methods of male empowerment, only rarely does it provide tools for the examination of male vulnerability’ (2001, p. 435). By drawing on the example of the comic hero who is often marked as hysterical (her example is Jerry Lewis but we could also add Jim Carey as a more contemporary example), Halberstam describes this character as a combination of ‘twitches and spasms, pratfalls and stutters; he spits, he trips, he cries, he screams’ (p. 436). Her argument is that by marking the funny man as hysterical (and the hysterical man funny), ‘we simply read him back into the phallic economy of having or lacking [the phallus]’ (p. 436). By contrast to psychoanalytic readings of masculinity, in king comedies, male characters need to grapple with the serious limitations of masculinity in a world where gender relations are changing and queer models of gender seem more compelling for men (and women) than traditional hegemonic masculinity with its impossible masculine ideal. Tumble Turn similarly turns the tables on psychoanalysis as it does not directly provide Dominic or Dart with solutions to their ‘problems’. Dominic tends to accept his various emotional disappointments – finding out that the love of his life, Ms Havercroft, is having an affair with his father; that his mother finds him a failure; and that his attempts to impress Elisa Flett fail. When he realises that his Uncle Peri is gay, after assuming he was heterosexual, he accepts it quite readily and even expresses his concern that gay people are labelled in a negative way: ‘I just don’t get it. Gay people don’t seem harmful to me. Some of them wear rude trousers, but this is not harmful, just extremely ugly and a bit sad’ (p. 139). He also leaves open the possibility that he too might be gay: ‘I suppose it’s still possible that I might be, although I’ve just seen Queen Noor of Jordan on TV and I’m captivated by her regal dusky

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beauty’ (p. 138). By the close of the story, Dominic is transforming his body from looking feminine to more masculine by doing butterfly stroke to build up his muscles, and toning his stomach: ‘I no longer look pregnant or busty’ (p. 152). While he doesn’t go white water rafting as his mother would like, he nevertheless works towards a productive masculinity centred on displaying his body in public while remaining vulnerable and sensitive. Archy, on the other hand, is a melancholic figure and unlike Dominic he has discovered that being an adult male ‘does not allay the fear of castration: it confirms it!’ (Halberstam, 2001, p. 436). In some ways, this text can be understood as an example of what Butler identifies as the ensuing ‘culture of gender melancholy’ (1997b, p. 31). Archy is a sad, lonely man, constantly ridiculed by Odette (his wife) who insults his manhood and fails to take his concerns seriously. For instance, when he confesses that he has ‘let my body go. My muscles are no longer welldefined. I found this out at the pool this afternoon’. Odette responds: ‘I could have told you that and saved you four dollars fifty’ (p. 41). She also doesn’t believe him when he tells her of his affair with Dominic’s teacher and says that ‘he is a totally useless human being who lives in a world of make-believe’ (p. 145). And when she finally accepts the truth of the affair she hits him over the head with a chair. The ironic relation between Archy’s performance of masculinity and its hegemonic ideal supplies the king moments. Despite Archy’s pathetic presentation, the king comedy elements of his character and his relations with his wife, Odette, expose the failure of the masculine ideal with comic effect. In the following exchange between Archy and Odette, there is a humorous mocking of the male body ideal as an impossibility, or at least something that is only achievable for gay men: Mum: Dad: Mum: Dad: Mum: […] Mum: Dad: Mum: Dad: Mum:

What is that magazine you’re reading? It’s called Men’s Health. What is it about exactly? Boiled cabbage and trombones. Don’t try to be funny. I notice it has a naked man on the cover. He’s wearing shorts, Odette. And he is in black and white so that makes it tasteful. They do that with a computer. What? All those bulges and things.


Dad:

Mum: Dad:

No, Odette, that is the natural male form. He is just a very fit man. And if I do all the exercises in this magazine I could look like him one day. Will you be attending the Gay Mardi Gras? I expect so. Now please stop reading over my shoulder. (p. 45)

In his efforts to restore a more youthful masculine appearance, Archy purchases a toupee. However, his toupee fails to have the desired effect, at least for Dominic and Odette. As Dominic says in his email to Peri: Dad hates it that he is losing his hair. He has obtained a toupee or ‘gentleman’s hairpiece’. It is not a very good toupee and it looks like it’s made of wombats’ hair. I think mum is allergic to it. She sneezes when Dad gets too close to her. No matter which way he wears it, it seems to be on backwards. (p. 38) The king effects of these instances generate laughs at the male subject’s expense by showing up the vulnerability of the male body, not its power. Archy’s failed attempts at rebuilding his body (and his hair), the failed affair, and his failure as a father constitute his melancholia. As Dominic tells Peri: ‘He’s weeping a fair bit and telling me that he has not been a good father and that he loves me’ (p. 149). However, Archy’s character also paints a picture of ‘the consequences of a shift of power that has subtly but completely removed him from the center of the universe’ (Halberstam, 2001, p. 436). We can also see Dominic’s character as showing evidence of king comedy traces, particularly with respect to his homoeroticism and non-phallic and misguided sense that girls are attracted to him. These two aspects make his sexuality ambiguous, or ‘kingy’. For instance, his admission of desire for seeing his male friend’s naked body and for older, glamorous (and unattainable) women such as Princess Di and Queen Noor undermines the apparent stable coherency of heterosexual identity, by revealing that it is unstable and far from coherent. Butler contends that the ambivalent self (for example, Dominic) nevertheless can have agency by giving up claim to self-coherence and by continuing to misrecognise the terms by which he is hailed. Throughout the text, Dominic misrecognises the ways in which others regard him and this is the underlying point of the comedy. He believes his teacher

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(Ms Havercroft) adores him and that other girls, such as Elisa Flett, are attracted to him: As we boarded the bus, I gave Elisa a meaningful look. She didn’t seem to notice. (I must work on my meaningful looks.) Perhaps she was too embarrassed to speak to me after the reflecting pool nightmare? I hoped to see a horse on the trip so that I could impress her with my knowledge of horse care and fetlocks. We had been travelling for about half an hour when I caught Elisa looking at me. Perhaps she had noticed my meaningful look and this was a delayed reaction? I was feeling better about the world now. Even the hole in the ozone layer seemed littler. (pp. 78–9) Rather than be hailed as a failure and a loser, Dominic takes up an alternative mode of masculinity that doesn’t rely on phallic authority. His friend Dart too seems to take up a similar subjectivity. By the end of the story, the two boys appear to remain unfazed by their non-normative masculinity and continue as individuals who engage with the world on their own terms. The comic treatment of the crises of heterosexuality in these texts works at disarming dominant masculinities through various strategies – crossdressing, irony, parody, kinging, and camp. Consequently, these texts can be read as trying to dismantle phallic authority and compulsory heterosexuality by drawing attention to the question: what is ‘normal’? – a question that has both tragic and comic effects for many of the characters. For readers and viewers, the endings of these texts may be only a small part of the vicarious pleasures that can be gained from temporary subversion of cultural norms undertaken by the narratives. I now consider how other kinds of pleasures can be derived from comic treatment of gender.

Dis/orderly pleasures In this section, I examine the contradictory pleasures that come with order and disorder as fictional characters experience changing subject positions when a disruptive presence enters their lives. The consequences of this alien ‘Other’ are that domestic or social spaces are reinscribed and desires are transformed with either utopian or dystopian possibilities. The dialogic relation between subject and space was evident in the previous discussion of She’s the Man; here my interest extends to how seemingly impervious constructs such as phallic authority can become


‘undone’ when their spatial limits are overturned or rejected. As the following discussion demonstrates, comedy provides one of the means for enabling a performativity of pleasure to emerge as modes of containment that enclose bodies are reinscribed, producing different kinds of subjectivities and states of subjectivation. As I argue, desire becomes a process through which the transgression of prohibitions impacts on subject position, permitting and delimiting agency and subjectivity. I employ, in part, Foucault’s (1986) term ‘heterotopia’ and Bakhtin’s (1984) description of the carnivalesque to describe the disorder and multiplicity that characterise some of the spaces in the picture book The Visitor (Bougaeva, 2007) and the film The Cat in the Hat (2003). Both texts offer different social orders that can exist in heterotopic spaces. As Hetherington notes: ‘Heterotopia organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. This alternative ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things’ (1997, pp. viii–ix). In the final text, Juno (2007), my attention turns to the teenage, maternal body, and how desire waxes and wanes as subjects’ longings for an ideal existence invariably take an unexpected turn. Juno, like other texts in this book, highlights the dilemmas of gender, and how despite its attempts to recoup or valorise particular subjectivities, desire always exceeds and transgresses its own self-imposed limits. All the texts in this chapter make various uses of comic elements – carnival, masquerade, witty dialogue, puns, and visual humour – to enable deviant, abject, or transgressive subjectivities to emerge as limits are broken and reinstated. The Visitor is a picture book that tells of how a life of apparent harmony enjoyed by two sisters is disrupted when their cousin John arrives. The women live in an isolated home on an island accessible by a ferry and where ‘the worst that ever happened was that sometimes snails ate the strawberries, or they ran out of tea’ (Bougaeva, 2007, unpaged). This female utopia is turned into a dystopia when their rude and domineering cousin decides to visit, without an invitation. Soon after arriving, John begins to criticise their home and lifestyle and sets about imposing order on what he regards as chaos: ‘I don’t know how you live in such a mess! Don’t you worry I’ll soon sort things out for you!’ He mends the leaking tap, the lamp, chairs, and other things. But then he decides to paint their pink house a muddy brown, bans the animals from living inside the house, reorganises the garden, and removes their possessions (‘all this junk’) into the attic leaving the rooms ‘bare and comfortless’. Not content to change the chaos of the domestic space, John embarks on reining in the errant

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bodies of the women, subjecting them to a boring diet, brisk morning work-outs, complicated exercises, and swimming (see Figure 5.3). The illustration of the two women in their bathing outfits, rubber tyres, and grim faces provides a comic counterpoint to the text which tells us simply that ‘John even got them swimming’. There is an irony at play in this text as John admonishes his cousins for not exercising or tidying up their home, yet before his arrival and after his departure the women were very active and their home had its own order. When the women lived alone, the illustrations show them fishing, running, gardening, washing, and after his departure they are depicted moving furniture back to where it belongs and repainting their house. While John considers his presence in the household as helpful in establishing order and neatness, he is unaware that his presence has the very disorderly effect he is trying to eliminate. Thus, the ironic interplay between words and image orient readers attitudinally and ideologically towards the represented subjects as the following account demonstrates in more detail.

Figure 5.3 From The Visitor by Sonja Bougaeva, reproduced by permission of Gecko Press


The Visitor clearly posits femininity and masculinity in binary opposition. Before John’s arrival, the women enjoy the pleasures of their self-sufficient subjectivities and self-created domestic space, a space that challenges the norms of what Butler calls the ‘heterosexual imperative’ (1993, p. 3). While John is able to transform the domestic space temporarily, he is unable to sustain it. When he finally decides to leave because his cousins are ‘such bores. A real pair of no-hopers’, the women, with the able assistance of their pets, restore the house to its original state. Thus, the encroachment of patriarchy on the women’s way of life, its transitory impact and departure, can be seen as questioning the construct of patriarchy and its presumed stability. Though the women and their space appear as compliant subjects and objects, they nevertheless are able to triumph over patriarchy’s failed attempts at stabilisation through its imposition of order on their chaos. Instead, the women restore their own kind of inertia – their bodies do not change and the home is returned to its former state of chaotic order. The binary is also visually encoded. John has a small, boyish appearance. His attire resembles that of a neat school boy with his socks and shoes, shorts, long white shirt and vest. By contrast, the sisters have large, rounded, mature figures, and wear simple unadorned dresses. The solidity of the feminine bodies is in opposition to the male’s active but somewhat diminutive masculine form. John’s earnest endeavours and self-righteousness (‘Don’t thank me – it’s no problem at all’) are comically juxtaposed by the facial and bodily expressions of the domestic pets that mirror the women’s embodied states of dejection and sadness. In developing the idea of heterotopia, Foucault (1986, p. 27) conceived of it as an ‘escape’ – an escape from the world, but also an escape from norms and structures that imprison human subjects and their desires to flourish in their heterogeneity and difference. The women’s home is in a sense an escape as their cloistral existence does not rely on men’s ability to define them. Rather, the women have the capacity to bring themselves and their world into being and create their own subjectivity without men. By existing on an island, the women live at the margins of the cultural centre, exemplifying what Butler understands as the power of bodies to rearticulate themselves (1993, p. 2). Furthermore, their rearticulation proves resilient as John’s attempts to gain authority over the women by subjecting them to his imposed order and restraint fail to incorporate them back into patriarchy. John’s failure to remove the women and his departure from the island can be understood as his ineptitude at performing the very roles patriarchy constructs and reifies for masculine and feminine subjects. Consequently, the heterotopic

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space that is the women’s home proves to be a site of an alternative way of doing things, including gender. The sisters are not named and are known only by their sibling relationship to each other. They are also identical twins, who do not exert their own identities. We assume they are women because we are told that they are sisters and they are illustrated as wearing dresses. Dresses aside, their physical appearance and body shape do not code them as stereotypically female (see Figure 5.4). While they are passive subjects who tolerate John’s rudeness and intrusive behaviour, this too may be an unreliable coding as deferential feminine subjects. Consequently, their characters never reveal their ‘real’ identities lurking under the façade of



benign androgynous twins, or, to put it more queerly, as proto-butchfemmes. Contesting the idea that an original, authentic identity exists beneath their surfaces, the twins are, as Butler phrases it, ‘not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy’ (1990a, p. 41, emphasis in original). In other words, the sisters expose the performative nature of identity and how one does one’s body. From a queer perspective, this indeterminacy exposes the artificiality of identity binaries. In the final image, we see among the wall ornaments a framed sepiacoloured photograph of a woman and girls, among them are the sisters as young girls (see Figure 5.5). The final figure in the framed sepia photo is obscured by a more recent colour photograph of a smiling John that has been inserted into the picture frame. One of the sisters is turned away from the camera and looks in John’s direction. The young girl’s gaze foreshadows his threat to female autonomy and John’s position at the margins metonymically suggests that a female utopia can only exist in relation to the gender binary which it aims to render absent.


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One of the underlying presumptions of heterotopia is that they can sever or invert connections to the dominant social order. This inversion of the dominant order and other power hierarchies is a feature of the children’s film, The Cat in the Hat. The film derives from the Dr Seuss book of the same name first published in 1957, but rewrites the original story by extending and embellishing through using the diverse expressive languages of film (Hutcheon, 2006). It also employs the carnivalesque to highlight the ‘two-world condition’ that Bakhtin posits – the official world of order and the world outside it (the world of chaos). The carnivalesque is manifested in the film through festive violence, sexual innuendo, rule breaking, and gross humour. This comic framework exposes and ultimately inverts the power relations and gender hierarchies in the story. The story begins, like its predecessor, when two children, Conrad and Sally, home alone and bored, have their lives turned upside down with the appearance of the wise-cracking Cat in the Hat. In this film, fantasy and reality collide in the domestic space of the children’s home. Despite the home’s conventionality and location in a suburb it is nevertheless a heterotopia as it is a space of adventure and escape from the mundane, and from the norms and structures that imprison the imagination and the lives of the children. In this space, the viewing audience is required to deal with contrasting notions of order and chaos, politeness and crudeness, beauty and grotesquerie: each couplet jostles for attention and laughs through subversion and carnivalesque humour. It is the pleasure that comes with revelling in disgust and chaos that makes The Cat in the Hat a carnivalesque text with its celebration, in Bakhtinian (1984, pp. 368–436) terms, of the lower bodily stratum. The film has its fair share of farting, belching, and peeing, as well as rule breaking, grotesquerie, and spectacles of excess. In this respect it employs a similar kind of humour to that we saw in the discussion of The Flim Flam Fairies in Chapter 2. The Cat is a grotesque and his animal/human hybridity is a licence for his transgressive behaviours and a contradiction of patriarchal notions of rationality and control. He is also a transgressive figure whose one-liners and double entendres are intended to shock and delight. As Jane Arthurs notes, ‘the transformation of disgust into humour is the provenance of the grotesque’ (1999, p. 137). Initially, Conrad is stereotypically represented as an exemplar of feral masculinity: a boy who likes to do the opposite of what he is told to do and engages in dare-devilish tricks like riding down the internal staircase on his skateboard while using loaves of bread and other household


groceries as makeshift protective padding. This born-to-be-wild child represents ‘chaos’ while his overly neat and obsessively organised, polite sister, Sally, is ‘order’. Sally looks like a catalogue girl of the past with her blonde pigtails and starched dress, shiny shoes and socks. However, she is an anachronism who organises her day with serious efficiency and commitment using a personal digital assistant while living in a 1950s pre-digital environment. This slippage across time and technological space provides an instance of changing notions of femininity that contrasts the ‘can-do’ girl of the post 1990s rhetoric with the ‘should-do’ girl of the 1950s. Sally is her mother-in-the-making and as such embodies girlish feminine perfection. She performs her femininity by combining the appearance of the proper little lady of the 1950s with the wily feminine charms of a post-feminist girl who knows how to get what she wants, traits which her mother (Joan) has perfected. However, Sally’s ever-willing-to-please behaviour, her use of flattery and a winning smile are hyperbolic acts and gestures that are never intended as literal endorsement of compliant femininity, but are employed strategically to gain her own ends. Consequently, her hypostasised femininity destabilises notions of feminine perfection. If the subtlety of this parodic take is overlooked by younger members of the viewing audience, it is given voice by Larry (the mother’s neighbour and boyfriend) when he fails to respond to Sally’s feminine charms by telling her with a no-nonsense directness: ‘No one likes a suck up.’ For Joan and Sally, carnival provides the temporary release from the type of femininity conventionally endorsed in their world. Within the film’s ideological gender hierarchy, the Cat is ‘Other’ to the symbolic order. The Cat, as the non-rational, non-human, unbound, unfinished, and uncontainable Other, delights in making a spectacle both of himself and of others. His constant shape-shifting as a television cooking celebrity, a Carmen Miranda impersonator, a tennis player, a bull fighter, and many other characters provides him with opportunities to entertain as well as to mock, and the carnivalesque spectacle produces laughter both for the children on screen and presumably for the viewers. Not only is the Cat a grotesque, but his body’s ability to change shape and gender embodies Bakhtin’s description of the grotesque body as: ‘not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits’ (1984, p. 26). Furthermore, the subversive reinscription of the body deconstructs the stability of both body and gender, and like other texts in this chapter, exposes the artificiality of identity binaries. The Cat’s rapid and changing masquerades make it difficult to sustain a particular viewing position as the rapidity of his

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shifts of identity and appearance challenge viewers to keep up with the visual excesses before their eyes. This shifting position is one of the viewing pleasures as the Cat’s masquerades expose media constructions of celebrity and consumerism while at the same time he self-consciously participates in the manufacturing process. For instance, the Cat metafictively nods to its origins as a Dr Seuss book (interspersing the familiar rhyming pattern of the original text) and as a production by Universal Studio (the Cat flashes tickets to one of its rides to the chink of a cash register). While the Cat is clearly the Other in the world of hyperrealism that the film exploits, so too are Joan and Mrs Kwan (the babysitter). Each is constructed superficially as the antithesis of the other, but both are manifestations in their own way of a hyperreal world. Joan is overstated visual (American) perfection – blonde curly hair, perfect body, perfect homemaker, caring mother, and the top salesperson at Humberfloob’s Real Estate. Mrs Kwan is a grotesque with her oversized body, garish make-up, huge magnifying spectacles, unflattering clothes, and hair in rollers. She is a caricature of the Japanese, similar to wartime cartoons of myopic Japanese soldiers in Western newspapers and film. She is negligent as a babysitter and openly defies the mother’s order of ‘no television’ by encouraging the children to watch a televised programme on sumo wrestling. Yet, despite her confronting appearance and eccentric behaviour, she is a passive character and her passivity is emphasised by her constant state of somnolence. She is subjected to a whole range of abuse from the Cat of which she is totally unaware due to her ability to sleep deeply no matter what the circumstance. She is also the butt of a series of ‘fat’ jokes. When the Cat is told that she is the babysitter he remarks: ‘You pay this woman to sit on babies? That’s disgusting. I do it for nothing!’ Thus, Mrs Kwan serves as a reminder in a Western thin-obsessed culture that fatness indicates subversion of the ideal and idealised. Her carnival incarnation of the grotesque woman disrupts notions of conventional femininity endorsed outside of carnival (the official world), drag performance, and subversive literature of the ‘she-devil’ kind. The extremes of femininity that Mrs Kwan and Joan represent are paradoxically located both inside and outside the heterosexual economy. While Mrs Kwan is the object of derision, Joan is the object of male desire and invites the film viewers’ gaze for a different purpose. Joan is the lust object of both Larry and the Cat. When the Cat first sees her photograph on the side table his hat and tail stiffen in an erection. The erotic display and its prohibitive potential are quickly quashed when the children inform the Cat that the woman in the photo is their


mother. The Cat’s whispered aside ‘Awkward’ to the viewing audience signals the transgressive nature of the incident and the boundary crossing it implies. The mother’s sexual desirability is reinforced through her similarity to Marilyn Monroe. However, in playing the cliché of female desirability and availability (she is a single mother), Joan is an ambivalent figure. So too is Mrs Kwan as fat, and as passive. In the spirit of a carnivalesque text, this ambivalence has a regenerative possibility in that both women are, in different ways, grotesques and as such they parody popular notions of what it is to be feminine by calling conventions into question through stereotypic ridicule (Bakhtin, 1984, pp. 66–73). Read this way, these females have the potential to call into question the problems of singularity of feminine identity. By exposing and parodying social conventions of femininity in the carnival tradition of excess, in opposite ways these female characters are able to expose the shortcomings of these conventions. However, the unruly Cat and unconventional, impervious Mrs Kwan generate spectacles of chaos and otherness and thus highlight the fantastic realm of the film as a heterotopic space, redolent of the revelry of carnival. The masculine subject is also ridiculed and becomes the object of disgust. This occurs when the superficial, smooth-talking, smart-dressing Larry is transformed beyond his control into a grotesque spectacle. Rather than invert the gender hierarchy, the film inverts the adult–child hierarchy by turning the tables on ‘normal’ adult–child power relations to give agency to the (submissive) child while stripping agency from the (dominant) adult. Thus, in the tradition of folk and fairy tales, The Cat in the Hat employs what Maria Tatar terms a ‘festive violence’ (1992, p. 169) where the slapstick pantomime of violent acts is clearly designed to entertain the child viewer and provide a spectacle of comeuppance for the baddie in the piece, in this example, Larry. Larry is established early in the film as a man of dubious character. He dislikes Conrad and urges his mother to send him away to Colonel Wilhelm’s Military Academy for Troubled Youth. His lusting after Joan and scheming to win his way into her heart and bank account is his primary motivation and the reason behind his façade of respectability. When the disgusting grotesque behind the façade is exposed, Larry’s downfall at the hands of the Cat and the children follows an orgy of heightened suffering and embarrassment. He falls through floors, is covered with purple goo, and finally squeezed out of the house via the outside drainpipe. Larry is literally abjected from the children’s home. The culminating point of the power inversion occurs when, after enduring this sequence of violent and humiliating acts, Larry is

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reduced to a snivelling, purple goo-covered abject subject begging Joan to marry him. The humiliation and abjection are complete when he sneezes, causing his own bodily fluid to emerge with the purple snotlike substance that sticks to him. Larry’s infantilising only exacerbates his grossness, and laughter is withheld as disgust registers on the faces of the children and Joan (and no doubt on the faces of the viewing audience), but nevertheless offers a perverse pleasure. This strategy for casting the abject character as a confronting, sickening image capable of generating a viewer’s desire for perverse pleasure is one with which many of the viewing audience would be familiar due to their exposure to scary or horror movies (Creed, 1999, p. 253). The significant difference is that, unlike horror films which play on the monstrous feminine, this film casts the male character as the one who experiences the abjection. However, Mrs Kwan is also abject and this raises the issue of how race becomes an easy target for humour, especially when the figure of the racialised body is a caricature. The harsh treatment of Larry at the diegetic level is retribution for his mean and conniving manner towards the children and their mother, but Mrs Kwan’s only real crime is that she is an unattractive, Japanese, narcoleptic babysitter. In terms of Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the film highlights the way disgust and aversion shore up the social order and demonstrate how, for the children at least, ‘one is or could easily become out of bounds, unruly, disgusting’ (Meagher, 2003, p. 33). By the story’s end, harmony and order have been restored. Larry is banished, the family is united and past tensions disappear. However, a trace of transgressive play remains as the penultimate scene shows Joan, freed from her restricting persona of feminine decorum, jumping exuberantly with her children on the couch in the formal living room – a previously prohibited act that Joan forbade. The masquerade of perfect femininity and domestic order and restraint has slipped and this provides a moment of nonconformity and joyful behaviour. The final scene shows the Cat walking away from the children’s home down the suburban street with its identical-looking homes, driveways, and landscaped gardens. As the Cat swaggers and swings his cane to the jaunty musical sound track, his retreating presence signifies an end to that period of aberration in the ordered life of the residents of Anville. However, the Cat’s ability to appear out of the blue serves as a reminder that he could return just as unexpectedly. Misadventure rules in The Cat in the Hat, turning order into chaos. However, depending on who is agential and who is denied agency, misadventure turns easily into adventure bringing with it disorderly


pleasures through power inversion and a reinscription of the domestic space into a heterotopic space with its own inverted social ordering. In the film Juno, another form of ‘misadventure’ initiates the plot. After her first experience of sex with her best friend Paulie Bleeker, 16-year-old Juno MacGuff becomes pregnant. However, unlike other more serious films (and novels) about teen pregnancy, sex, abortion, and adoption, Juno deals with these issues in a humorous way. Much of the text’s humour is transgressive and resides in disguising the seriousness of the situation with Juno’s glib yet frank take on her situation. This humorous treatment overturns the more familiar plot of the pregnant teenager with its familiar set of euphemisms to refer to both the maternal subject and the matter of abortion. Juno tells her friend, she is ‘up the spout’ and decides to ‘nip this thing in the bud’ by phoning ‘Women Now’ (abortion clinic) to ‘procure a hasty abortion’. This story is essentially about desire and couples – Juno and Paulie desire each other; but for the childless couple Vanessa and Mark Loring, Vanessa desires a baby and Mark desires independence and a chance to relive his lost youth. Juno also desires the ideal family for her baby, whom she plans to give up for adoption to Vanessa and Mark. In a related way, the desire to create the ideal family of her longing drives Vanessa’s decision to adopt Juno’s baby and governs her obsessive attention to fulfilling her destiny of becoming a mother. As she explains to Juno’s father when they first meet to discuss the adoption, she was ‘born to be a mother’. However, the film demonstrates that the longing for the ideal is often unfulfilled, and, as an example of performativity, longing itself becomes idealised, always falling short of what it desires. Despite the text’s privileging of humour through the razor-sharp observations and witticisms of its central character, it ultimately takes a more serious turn to facilitate the mature awakening of Juno to the realisation that the future cannot be guaranteed to develop according to our desires. This is not to say pleasure is not possible, and the film trades on the variety of ways that humour turns misadventure, chaos, and uncertainty into spaces of pleasure. In trying to tease out these spaces of pleasure, I want to focus on the film’s treatment of class and contemporary (Western) society’s celebration of consumption, pleasure, and solipsism. Class and capitalism also provide a means for examining gender relations and phallicised whiteness. Juno’s initial decision to have an abortion is abandoned after she visits the Women Now clinic. Outside the clinic she encounters a fellow student, Su-Chin, who is staging a solitary, anti-abortion protest, repeating in her corrupted English: ‘All babies want to get borned! All

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babies want to get borned!’ Her final words that the baby has fingernails introduce the pro-life element that overturns Juno’s pro-choice stance. The interior of the clinic is a contradictory space in terms of pro-life and pro-choice performativity. The bored young receptionist with piercings tells Juno to fill out the form and to note ‘all the scores and sores’ and offers her a free boysenberry-flavoured condom from a large bowl filled with the contraceptives. The room’s pro-choice posters on the walls are barely discernible in the rather dingy interior, and the detached and routine atmosphere discursively construct the space in terms that ironically render the pro-choice situation uncongenial: these contradictions reflect the oppositional viewpoints of abortion in society (and which this film prompted in blogs and editorials). The clinic is visually coded as a working-class women’s port of call. It appears to be located in the back blocks of the city and its humble and unassuming frontage and uninviting interior are a far cry from a more upmarket clinic or doctor’s surgery that might connote a bourgeois respectability. As such, the Women’s Now clinic is a classed site, one whereby conflicting moral values might be read: pro-life/pro-choice; reputable/disreputable; moral/immoral; middle-class/working-class maternity. A further contradiction lies with the minor character of Su-Chin. Her enticements to Juno to obey God’s law, the mocking of her ethnicity through the grammatical error, and the implication that she uses anti-depressants positions her as an unreliable and irrelevant subject. However, her point that the baby has fingernails remains with Juno who repeats this later to her friend when she tells her that she has decided to have the baby, but will give it up for adoption. Thus, Su-Chin facilitates Juno’s decisions not to abort, to see the pregnancy through to birth and give the baby up for adoption to the ideal (white, middle-class) family. Juno’s family is clearly coded as working-class. Her mother abandoned the family when Juno was young and now lives in Arizona with her second husband and their three children. Her only contact is by an annual cactus plant that she sends Juno every Valentine’s Day. Juno only mentions her mother’s abandonment once – ‘This cactus-gram stings even worse than your abandonment’ – but the significance of this abandonment clearly is the motivation for her desire to find the ideal family for her baby. Her father (Mac) is an air-conditioning repairman and her stepmother (Bren) is a nail technician. Both parents support Juno and give her a wide berth (pun aside) throughout her pregnancy so that she can maintain her independence. Their small bungalow is homely but cluttered compared with the two-storey, minimalist-decorated home of the prospective adoptive parents, Vanessa and Mark.


After Juno finds the Lorings’s advertisement for a baby in the PennySaver, she and her father arrange to meet the couple and discuss the adoption. The scene at the Lorings’s home provides several comic moments which turn on the class differentials between the MacGuffs and the Lorings. Juno’s indie style of dressing – T-shirt, checked flannel shirt, jeans, hooded jacket, and sneakers – contrasts with Vanessa’s expensive and well-groomed couture, and pearl necklace. The clothing inscribes their bodies and also their differences in class and age. Juno is clearly impressed with the home and the couple, and comments on greeting Vanessa: ‘Oh, wicked pic in the PennySaver, by the way. Super classy – not like those people with the fake woods in the background. Honestly who do they think they’re fooling?’ During the discussion, which is attended by the Lorings’s solicitor, the discourses that circulate the room – Juno’s hip and vulgar wisecracks, the legal talk, Vanessa’s cultured and reasoned conversation, and Mac’s self-conscious comments – turn the space into a heteroglossia of competing ideological voices. After Juno excuses herself to go to the toilet (‘Can I use the facilities? Because being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit!’), she and Mark discover that they have a shared love of horror movies, guitars, and grunge music. She also learns that Mark, a failed rock star, now composes music for commercials. He has his own room where Vanessa has agreed he can have all his ‘stuff’ – guitars, music, sound system, posters, and rock memorabilia. Mark’s room is his zone of ‘chaos’ in the otherwise orderly and expensively furnished domestic space reminiscent of Home Beautiful magazines that Vanessa lovingly tends with great attention to detail. Consequently, the scene signifies the home as a paradoxical space: no longer a man’s castle, but still a woman’s pride and joy. Furthermore, the home is a womblike container for Mark’s room. I will take up discussion of this infantilising strategy subsequently. Vanessa’s home in the suburbs with its bespoke furnishings and Mark’s expensive ‘toys’ defines dominant conceptions of the pleasures that advanced capitalism can bring. Yet, these commodities of economic success and nostalgia are dominated by lack. Despite my reluctance in the previous chapter to use Lacan, we could speculate on how this lack renders desire as an unfillable space: it is the lack of a child which is for Vanessa the major household/home item she is unable to obtain. When Vanessa asks Juno if she would like (monetary) compensation for giving up her baby, the question puzzles both Juno and her father. Juno’s response cuts short any commodity-exchange possibility: ‘No … no … I don’t want to sell the thing.’ While Juno is also a material girl, with

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her own hamburger phone, guitar, and a bicycle, she does not enter into the adoption process for any financial reward. Added to Vanessa’s consumerism is the growing number of items she buys for the not-yet-born baby. The sheer number and cost of the items stun Juno who wonders why she didn’t wait for friends to give her a baby shower. Vanessa and Juno represent different forms of womanhood and as such are representative of the ways in which feminism is not a totalising concept or a one-size-fits-all garment for women, no matter their class, age, or other defining characteristics. It is a somewhat too easy to describe the two women in terms of their obvious differences. However, by the close of the story both characters are united in a kind of sisterly post-feminist bond (see Chapter 1). When Mark leaves Vanessa so he can live alone in a loft in the city, admitting that he is not ready for fatherhood, Vanessa goes ahead and adopts Juno’s baby as a single mother: not the ideal family arrangement she had in mind, but a satisfactory one for her nevertheless. Vanessa is emblematic of both pre and post-feminism. Although she desires motherhood and marriage, she is not concerned with proving herself her husband’s equal. On the contrary, she is the major breadwinner of the household and enjoys the financial rewards of a good career and the comforts they bring. Both Juno and Vanessa possess the confidence and self-belief to take on pregnancy/motherhood on their own terms. Juno therefore engages with post-feminist concepts of female agency which is embodied through a combination of toughness, resilience, and self-assertion. Vanessa’s overt performativity of a particular kind of pretty-femininity plays off Juno’s more androgynous style. While both characters reject any notion of the ‘victim feminism’ that Second Wave Feminism has been accused of fostering (Siegel, 2007, p. 77), dilemmas continue to surface which perhaps are more characteristic of post-feminism. These dilemmas are in relation to how women’s bodies become the sites of what Siegel calls ‘power capitalism’; that is, how economic capital enables women like Vanessa to purchase a glamour that is beyond the means of other less economically advantaged women such as Juno. This is not to say that all women (rich or poor) desire the looks that money can buy. Whereas Vanessa’s focus on her home and her appearance is typical of the consumerist materialism of post-feminism, Juno’s relative lack of interest in her appearance is consonant with both Second Wave and Third Wave Feminism’s more prosaic views of the female body. However, Juno also can be seen as challenging the idea of woman as object by creating through her clothing, smart talk, and refusal to


become a victim. Her image of masculine-styled femininity contrasts with the more feminine-styled masculinity that Paulie represents. Juno deliberately foregrounds female performativity, with the male characters (Paulie, Mark, and Mac) providing counterpoints to Juno and, to a lesser extent, Vanessa and Bren. The question of phallic masculinity and how the male characters are ‘undone by norms’ of gender and heteronormativity is an interesting effect of the film. Juno provides us with ways of considering how traditional versions of masculinity and femininity, and a certain kind of romance narrative, are played out and subverted at this particular cultural moment, when the terms of heteronormativity are changing. In particular, Juno makes visible the ways heteronormativity can make certain heterosexual males seem clueless individuals, who appear to lack the social, cultural, and ideological resources to resignify themselves differently. Although Mark and Paulie are presumably ‘straight’, they are not fully straight in the dominant sense of conforming to a particular and traditional version of masculinity. Paulie is a ‘Mommy’s Boy’ and the diminution of his name adds to his infantilising by his mother and others. When Juno waits outside his home to tell him that she is pregnant, she assumes a patriarchy-indrag pose, sitting in a large leather armchair sucking a pipe, whereas Paulie appears twee in his yellow-coordinated running outfit – headband, wristbands, shorts, and T-shirt. In the exchange that follows, Paulie is the object of Juno’s gaze: JUNO: PAULIE: JUNO:

Wow your shorts are like especially gold today. My mom uses colour safe bleach. Go Carol

One of the parodic visual elements of the text is the running joke that Paulie supplies by virtue of his lack of phallic authority, yet despite this lack, Juno finds him attractive and desirable. His ‘lack’ is further underscored when, after hearing that Paulie is the father of her child, Mac says as a lowered aside: ‘I didn’t think he had it in him.’ Paulie always has a slightly puzzled, tentative, and nerdish appearance, and rarely engages in any extended speech. He has limited self-awareness and tends to go along with whatever Juno wants – sex/no sex, abortion/no abortion, friendship/no friendship, and finally he agrees to her request to keep seeing each other after the baby is born. He accepts these changing subject positions without question or protest; he also remains loyal to Juno and does not attempt to distance himself from her during the pregnancy. In a gesture that demonstrates

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his love for Juno and his own dependency on her, he curls up next to her on the hospital bed after she has had the baby and it has been removed to the nursery. Unable to assert a phallic masculinity that is prescribed by the terms of heteronormativity, Paulie’s character exposes the myth of dominant masculinity’s invulnerability, aggression, and lack of emotion: PAULIE:

JUNO:

You have no reasons to be mad at me, I mean, you know, you broke MY heart. I should be royally ticked off at you. I should be really cheesed off, I shouldn’t want to talk to you anymore. What? Cause I got bored and had sex with you and I didn’t want to like marry you?

Paulie struggles to articulate his feelings of anger and hurt, and his words lack any convincing authority and can only be expressed in terms of the modal form ‘should’ to express an expected reaction. Furthermore, his feeble and immature comments are dismissed by Juno who adds a barbed attack on his sexual desirability and marriageability. In Undoing Gender, Butler says that ‘sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life’ (2004, p. 1). For Mark, his life with Vanessa becomes unlivable as he is unable to see himself in the terms that she has mapped out for him – as a father, a responsible adult who can give up his thoughts of being a rock star, and a legitimate breadwinner (Vanessa is dismissive of his status as a work-from-home jingle writer). Unable to be recognised within the set of norms that come with this heterosexual marriage, Mark decides to leave and live as he wants. The following exchange captures the shifting subject positions that operate between the extremes of victimhood and solipsism: MARK: VANESSA: MARK: VANESSA:

There’s just things I still want to do. Like what? Be a rock star? Don’t mock me. You’re trying to do something that’s never going to happen. And you know what? Your [grunge band] shirt is stupid. Grow up. If I have to wait for you to become Kurt Cobain, I’m never going to be a mother.

Both Mark and Paulie have heterosexual ‘privilege’, but for Mark especially there is a downside of that privilege that makes it ‘unlivable’ in


terms of the terms of the social and marital roles and expectations associated with the oppositional construction of gender. Mark and Paulie appear to be without other significant males in their lives. Paulie runs with the track team and has some social contact with others, but this sociality is not heavily featured and is a departure from more conventional teen films with their emphasis on homosociality (for example, American Pie). Similarly, Mark as a white, middle-class, thirty-something male seems adrift in a world where he appears to have no resources to help him craft a collective alternative to the exclusive life he lives with Vanessa. He wants to live in his loft and see his dreams come true, but the narrative suspends further speculation on the outcome. He also appears to hanker for a masculinity that has passed, just like his hero Kurt Cobain. As the film moves towards its ending, we come to see that Mark is the subject who most represents and figures lack. Paulie seems to fare better as the closing scene shows him and Juno in a harmonious space singing and playing their guitars. However, for someone who admits that he tries ‘really hard, actually’ to be cool, Paulie is a long way off from becoming just Paul. As I’ve attempted to show, Juno can be read as a parody of romance which upends the conventional notions of white feminine and masculine subjectivity that traditionally shape this genre. Its appeal lies in its fresh and sassy rewriting of the teen romance-comedy through the comedic performances of its wisecracking female protagonist. In revisioning sexual mores and gender norms, Juno nevertheless remains entangled in the dilemmas of gender – as contradictory spaces where abject masculinity is not recuperated, female sexuality and pregnancy remain fraught and linked issues, and the materialism and solipsism of advanced capitalism continue to shape desire and the pleasures that money can (and cannot) buy. I began this chapter by commenting on comedy’s double-edged potential to illuminate and to contain. The fictions I have discussed frequently rewrite and revise other stories or motifs that narrative loves to revisit. In explaining the appeal of adaptations and why some stories or ideas keep getting repeated, Linda Hutcheon suggests that ‘stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places’ (2006, p. 176). This changing agenda is clearly evident in all the texts discussed in this chapter. Films such as Juno and She’s the Man use cliché with respect to sexual misadventure and cross-dressing as the mechanism through which ongoing issues of class, pregnancy, and gender relations are given familiar but different comic treatment in terms of heteronormativity. Old comic strategies, such as the carnivalesque, are also revisited in

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The Cat in the Hat, and although its humour targets a dual audience of adults and children, it remains faithful to carnival’s ultimate restoration of order, albeit a revised social order. We have also considered how new forms of comedy, such as kinging, rework camp humour by shifting the focus from mimicking femininity to masculinity. The Race of the Century and Tumble Turn can be read as having king effects or traces whereby representations of male vulnerability and the crisis of heterosexuality become the subject for humour. The Visitor also challenges the heterosexual imperative by exploring a heterotopia of female space in which two women enjoy a life that is self-sufficient and seemingly free of the strictures imposed by the dominant social order. In all the texts I have discussed, comedy sometimes works to unsettle and then to affirm a reconstituted order regarding gender and sexuality held by Western cultures. Sometimes comedy, for example through satire, can be used to socially conservative ends. Comedy can enable us to see how social codes and gender norms can be so entrenched in our psyches and inscribed on our bodies that it is not until they are ridiculed or parodied that we come to realise the hold they have on us. By laughing at these restrictive codes and ways of being, we are able to release the tension that often exists in maintaining them. However, the subversion of norms results in both pleasures and threats. This ambivalence rests on the paradox of agency, a paradox that is heightened when gender norms and regulations work to enable agency for some at the expense of denying agency for others.

Conclusion

There was this beautiful princess locked in a high tower … And you couldn’t have this dream without a prince. He was both handsome and ugly, bubbly and serious, curious and brave … And in a dream-logic way he was often two princes, which she had to choose between. Sometimes the princess chose the handsome prince, and sometimes the ugly one. Either way, her heart was broken. (Westerfeld, 2005) This opening epigraph from Scott Westerfeld’s novel entitled Pretties offers a final dilemma for this book – the choice between two princes. However, as the narrator tells us, no matter which prince or version of a prince the beautiful princess decided upon, either way her heart was always broken. In appearing to have the last say on the matter of dilemmas, this excerpt also returns us to the beginning and to my purpose in writing this book, namely, to explore the dilemmas, contradictions, and anxieties that arise within a binary system of gender and sexuality in children’s texts. The epigraph also refers us back to other dilemmas the preceding chapters have explored with respect to beauty, romance, desire, fantasy, and reality. Had the dream princess not been beautiful would she have had to choose between two princes? If she had been ugly, would the princes have bothered to turn up outside the tower? What if she had been a scullery maid locked in the tower? Would her status have rendered her unworthy of rescue? These questions lead us to the realm of speculation as we engage in possible scenarios. They also serve to illustrate my approach throughout this book: to persist with asking difficult questions without always offering answers or 195

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expecting to find any. Such is the journey I have set for myself and for my readers. In exploring gender dilemmas, my quest has led me to consider the obstacles, the predicaments, and the difficult choices or positions one encounters en route; the implications of this quest and the very question of how texts are produced for children and young adults are intended to assist readers in understanding the complexities and difficulties that normative conceptions of a sexual and gendered life entail. The theories that I have drawn upon throughout the writing of this book do not simply exist as such, but are constructed through the very discourses which write, read, and speak them into existence. Whereas I have attempted to resist analysing the texts with the fervour of a zealot, I have maintained, nevertheless, a passionate desire to move into areas that are challenging and cause a degree of discomfort. By putting the theories to work in the examination of children’s and YA fictional texts, I have attempted to show how both the theories and the texts contribute in various ways to the dilemmas of gender and sexuality, as well as offer possible ways out of these dilemmas. Furthermore, I have raised some of the dilemmas and tensions that exist between feminist and postfeminist theories, between feminism and queer theories, and between psychoanalytic (Lacanian) and post-structuralist (Deleuzian) theories. Despite my coupling of these theories, we can hopefully move beyond strict binary discourses. Throughout the chapters, I have attempted to show how these competing, and, at times, complementary theoretical discourses provide productive ways for engaging with debates about representation, signification, desire, and subjectivity. Fiction and other cultural texts are involved in the discursive construction of gendered (and other embodied) subjectivities. In our reading of texts, we are also producing our subjectivity as we engage conceptually and emotionally with the ‘discourses that the text activates (those out of which it is constructed and those that it draws out in response from us)’ (Misson & Morgan, 2006, p. 81). Discourses construct and constitute social practice and areas of knowledge. Fictional texts produced for children and young people comprise discourses, both specialist (literary, filmic) and everyday ones, which embody our individual and shared knowledge of how fictional texts work, and our common and different understandings of human existence. As readers, we take up positions in these discourses in order to make meaning of texts. Texts offer multiple subject positions for readers and we can align ourselves with these or resist them or shift in our positions throughout the text. Our responses to these texts are as varied as there are readers. Similarly, readers of this book come with their

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own cultural understandings, positionings, and backpacks of theories to take on their journey. Whether we resist or align with a particular subject position and the mode of subjectivity which it brings with it, we do so from within a complex network of our social and cultural experiences, personal dispositions and preferences, and previous reading practices. The competing gender discourses that are explicit or implicit in the children’s and YA texts I have discussed illustrate how narratives sustain or challenge existing social norms and ways of ‘doing’ gender. An enculturating function of children’s literature is to propose ways of being in the world that are both desirable from a societal point of view and rewarding for the individual. This function of literature is present even in the examples where characters transgress or subvert social norms, with narrative resolution resting on recuperating transgression or transforming the social context in a way that is more supportive of the ‘transgressive’ individual. Given this interest in representing competing and complementary desires, many of the fictional texts in this book locate desire in an individual’s need for recognition and acceptance by others. I have explored how for some texts there is a working of a Lacanian lack or absence with respect to desire. Other desires can be better understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising by seeing them as a kind of productive, creative force. These different ways of looking at desire have implications for both our teaching of children’s literature and our own scholarly endeavours. They also offer us ways for thinking beyond the limits of fiction to our own personal desires and social realities. Fiction always offers a mediated account of a world, but as readers we are drawn to it because we desire what it offers or what we expect it to deliver. Hence, romance fiction with its promise of love, lust, and adventure as well as heartbreak, love-sickness, and rejection appeals to readers who seek these often contradictory desires to be sated or heightened. Another desire that we bring to the reading of fiction or viewing of film is that we think these works have some important things to tell us. In this respect, I have considered the examples as having something worthwhile to say about gender. Throughout this book, I have worked with Butler’s notion of performativity of gender: gender is not what we are but what we do. By repeating certain acts, we learn how to perform ways of being male or ways of being female. Related to this notion of repetition is citationality: that is, we are constantly ‘citing’ socially established ways of being a man or ways of being a woman. In a related way, children’s literature is also performative in that it uses language and discourse in ‘an active, world-making way’ (Culler, 2007, p. 145). In drawing on Austin’s notion

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of performative utterances, Culler posits that in claiming to tell us about the world, literature succeeds by ‘bringing into being the characters and events they relate’ (2007, p. 152). A literary text’s performativity lies in its repetition of norms and conventions, as well as in its potential for inspiring acts of reading, recollection, and re-reading. In the process of fictionalising ‘reality’, literature (and film) may also effect change in how readers/viewers act in the world. In Culler’s terms, literature’s performativity ‘interrogates by repeating foundational acts – in a repetition that can have critical value, as it animates and alters forms that it repeats’ (p. 163). This notion of performativity offers a productive direction for us to consider as part of our ongoing criticism and teaching of children’s literature. Children’s literature plays a crucial role in children’s lives both in and away from school. The ripple effect of children’s book production and reception means that books are read individually and in company, in private and public spaces. However, both the writing and the reading of fictional work is a learned social practice. We therefore need to think about our own reading practices and the assumptions that inform our reading of children’s texts. In doing so, we might like to reflect on the enchantment of children’s literature and what this means for how these texts are ‘used’ in institutional contexts such as classrooms, libraries, and universities. It is not my purpose to be the killjoy who subjects all children’s books to an imposed political correctness checklist. There are already too many agendas which attempt to strip readers of the ‘delight in the impolite’ (McGillis) and the subversive pleasures of the carnivalesque (Mills). Teachers and librarians have a repertoire of skills and knowledge in relation to reading and children’s literature. Indeed, other professionals such as psychologists and counsellors also draw upon resources of children’s literature to assist children in coming to terms with a range of debilitating personal and social conditions. So too do students and scholars of literature bring a range of developing or sophisticated understandings of narrative. My point is that it is impossible to enforce a particular kind of agenda on what books children should read, for what purpose, and with what desired outcome. However, we can continue to think about how ‘children’s literature reflects, shapes, and projects debates about […] difference through its various dimensions – aesthetic, commercial, educational, ideological’ (Dudek & Ommundsen, 2007, p. 5). Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction has attempted to engage with repeated forms and genres of children’s literature and film to interrogate the dilemmas, tensions, and contestations that arise within the

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different, represented experiences of gender and sexuality. The process of interrogation has been wide-ranging, attending to: the restrictions and regulations of social norms on gendered and sexual identities; the interplay between desire and agency; the relationship between the individual and the social context; and the value of thinking beyond anthropocentrism to consider the ethical concerns that extend to human, posthuman, and animal. We have only scratched the surface. While every text suffers from insufficiency, we can, nevertheless, continue to ask questions. For me, some further questions remain: How can a utopian vision inform our rethinking of gender? What would be the possibilities of thinking about gender and sexuality in terms that refuse binaries? What new modes of subjectivity can different media and technologies offer? But rather than continue with a catalogue of questions, I think it is more important that readers ask their own questions, thereby opening up new directions for research and pedagogy.

Notes Introduction: Rethinking Gender 1. I borrow here a point made in the first instance by Larry McCaffery who says that ‘SF possesses the capacity to “defamiliarize our science fictional lives,” reflecting them back to us in more hyperbolic terms’ (Bukatman, 1990, p. 11). 2. See Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits: A Selection for his discussion of the concept of desire as always unsatisfied, springing from lack (because it relates to a fantasy or imaginary object, rather than a real object). 3. Acronyms such as GLBTI (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual, Intersex) provide a useful shorthand intended to be inclusive of different sexualities. However, such clustering also tends to limit the differences within each ‘classification’. 4. In her book Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (2005) Celia Daileader enquires into Anglo-American cultural obsession with stories of inter-racial sexual tension, particularly between a black male and a white female.

1 Desire, Pleasure, and Romance: Post-Feminism and Other Seductions 1. For example, the Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice (2004). 2. In a related way, Granny, in the television show The Kumars at No. 42, with her repeated sexual innuendos and flirtations with male guests similarly transgresses the grandmother figure as the morally superior and sexually restrained matriarch. 3. In the website, AfterEllen – Views, Reviews, and Commentary on Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Entertainment and the Media, it is claimed that Chadha’s decision to replace any lesbian romance (leaving it as an implied subtext and perception of other characters) was made to appeal to a mainstream audiences in both India and the West. 4. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s supposed homosexuality continues to influence discussions about his poetry and its homoerotic content. Given that TJ constantly quotes from his works provides an interesting parallel between the two lives (one fictional and the other real) and the apparent ‘secret’ they both share.

2 The Beauty Dilemma: Gendered Bodies and Aesthetic Judgement 1. The novel has subsequently been remade twice as a film and as a telemovie. The most recent film (2003) starred ‘wild child’ Lindsay Lohan playing the part of the daughter, Annabelle Andrews. 2. Cited in Dickie (1997, p. 6). 200

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3. As reported in a news article dated 4 December 2008, ‘Barbie beats back Bratz’, a US judge has made the decision that MGA Entertainment Inc. is to cease its production and sale of Bratz dolls. The decision was a major win for Mattel as it decided in Mattel’s favour that Bratz designer Carter Bryant developed the concept for the dolls while working at Mattel. (http:// money.cnn.com/2008/12/04/news/companies/bratz_dolls.ap/index.htm? postversion=2008120406 Accessed 8/12/08). 4. In 2003, 223,000 teenagers in the USA had cosmetic procedures (skin peels, collagen implants, Botox) and 39,000 teenagers had surgical procedures (nose reshaping, breast lifts, augmentation, liposuction, tummy tucks). In 2003, there was a 14 per cent increase on surgical procedures. (See Zuckerman: ‘Virtual Mentor’ American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 7, 3 (March 2005) http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2005/03/oped1-0503.html. 5. See Review Report ‘Childhood Obesity, Prevalence and Prevention’ by Dehghan et al. in 74 Heart Views, 6, 3. 6. The Biggest Loser is a fitness reality TV series whereby overweight contestants undertake a gruelling exercise and dieting regime in order to win the title of ‘Biggest Loser’. 7. For example, it is speculated that Tinkerbell in the Disney version of Peter Pan was modelled on Marilyn Monroe (others claim it was Margaret Kerry), Ursula the sea witch in Little Mermaid on drag artist Divine, and Pocahontas on ‘supermodel’ Naomi Campbell. 8. JonBenét Ramsey was an American child beauty pageant contestant who was murdered at the age of six. She was found dead in the basement of her parents’ home. The case prompted considerable worldwide media attention and condemnation of child beauty contests.

3 Gendered Cyber-Bodies: The Dilemma of Technological ‘Existenz’ 1. Virtual technologies is used here in a generic sense to encompass related terms, such as: cyberspace, artificial reality, augmented reality, telepresence, and virtual environment. 2. For a more detailed discussion of genetic engineering in YA fiction refer to Elaine Ostry’s (2004) article: ‘“Is He Still Human? Are You?”: Young Adult Science Fiction in the Posthuman Age’, The Lion and the Unicorn 28, 2, 222–46. 3. In Eva (1988) by Peter Dickinson a girl’s brain is transplanted into the body of a chimp. In Shade’s Children (1997) by Garth Nix, children are removed from their families at the age of 14 and placed in Dorms where their brains are removed and inserted into artificially generated creatures. In the Hollywood comedy film, The Man with Two Brains (1983) Steve Martin plays Dr Hfuhruhurr, the world’s greatest neurosurgeon, who has invented the cranial screw-top brain entry. 4. For interesting future human-robot scenarios, refer to the work of robotics researcher Hans Moravec, including his book, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988). 5. Several intertextual jokes run through the film, Sky High: the Principal is former Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter who comments at one point: ‘What do you

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think I am? Wonder Woman?; and the family Stronghold is the name of the producer Max Stronghold’. 6. Manga is the Japanese word for comics and animé is a style of Japanese animation. Both forms are extremely popular in Japan and are growing in popularity in Western cultures.

4 Queer Spaces in a Straight World: The Dilemma of Sexual Identity 1. See Chapter 2, ‘The Pool of Tears’ in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. 2. Roughgarden has been both criticised and praised for her book. Some of the criticisms concern her Disneyfied approach to writing about non-humans with her use of cute anthropomorphism, and misrepresenting Darwin and not providing convincing research to support some of claims about social selection. On the positive side, there has been praise for her transdisciplinary approach across the sciences and cultural studies and for providing general readers with information about the diversity of animal species’ genders, sexualities, and sexes. For a full critical review, see Dickemann (2008) Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, 2, 313–29. 3. See ‘Inappropriate Penguins? Children’s Book Moved’ Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 5 March 2006: http://www.deseretnews.com/home. 4. For a detailed discussion of families in utopian and dystopian fiction refer to Chapter 7: ‘Ties That Bind: Reconceptualising Home and Family’ in Bradford et al. (2008) New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. 5. In Chapter 6, Sebastian and Grady hire Ma Vie en Rose from the video shop providing an intertextual point of reference. 6. For example, psychological counselling is recommended for Charlie/Charlotte in the Australian novel Obsession (2001) by Julia Lawrinson as a way of helping her come to terms with her aberrant lesbianism. Also, she is forbidden to see Kate (the girl that she desires). In Ma View En Rose, eight-year-old Ludo undergoes unsuccessful counselling. When his cross-dressing becomes public knowledge, he and his family are marginalised by the middle-class neighbourhood in which they live, and eventually are forced to move to another more ‘downmarket’ location. 7. A similar scene serves as the introduction to Ma View en Rose where the viewer witnesses Ludo in female clothes, applying lipstick, and singing softly in the private space of a bedroom while the family entertains neighbours at a ‘welcome to our family’ party. Given that the film has been referenced in the text, it would seem that this scene attempts to replicate/reappropriate this moment from the original text.

5 No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender 1. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet is arguably the film that began the procession of teen films, since the 1980s, based on Shakespeare’s plays such as Twelfth Night (She’s the Man), The Taming of the Shrew (10 Things I Hate About You);

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As You Like It ( Just One of the Guys). For a study of the marketing of Shakespearean teen films refer to Emma French (2006) Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood. 2. In The Birdcage (a remake of the French film La Cage aux Folles) a gay couple (Armand and Albert) pass as a heterosexual married couple to avert any problems with the prospective parents-in-law of Armand’s son – the outcome of his one and only heterocoital engagement. By the ending, the subterfuge is exposed but both couples come to an amiable acceptance of their difference when the right-wing parents of the son’s fiancée are forced to cross-dress to avoid a political scandal from being spotted in a gay nightclub. In Kinky Boots, Charlie Price inherits the family shoe factory after his father dies, but the factory is a financial disaster and closure is imminent. A chance encounter with a drag queen, Lola, solves Charlie’s financial crisis when the factory decides to produce a range of extravagant ‘kinky’ boots for the drag queen and other drag artists for their cabaret act.

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Index abjection/the abject, 14, 16, 71, 77–84, 109–13,146, 177, 185–6, 193 see also Kristeva, Julia adaptation, 3, 158, 160, 193 Adkins, Lisa, 69 aesthetics, 26, 59–92 class aesthetics, 75–6 de-aesthetic, 74, 77–84 of disgust, 26, 61, 77– 90 of female body, 67, 71, 73–4 homoerotic aesthetic, 168 agency, 9–10, 14–16, 48, 53–4, 63, 90, 104, 138–9, 151, 185–6 female agency, 36, 38, 40, 92, 158, 190 marketing of, 68 paradox of, 194 see also subjectivity Ahmed, Sara, 9 alternative reality, 94, 97 see also virtual reality anamorphosis, 95, 99 animé, 121–3, n.202 Arthurs, Jane, 64 Ashby, Justine, 48, 50 Atkinson, Meera, Beauty and the Bête Noir, 91 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 163, 177, 182–3, 185 see also carnivalesque Balsamo, Anne, 94 Bansch, Helga, Odd Bird Out, viii, 129, 142, 144 Barnes, Helen, Killing Aurora, 85 Barreca, Regina, 156 Baudrillard, Jean, 95, 99 Beatts, Anne, 156 beauty, 26, 59–92, 182, 195 beauty ideal, 60–2, 64–7, 69, 77, 79, 85, 90–1 beauty contests/pageants, 71–7, n.201

cyberbody beauty, 101 cosmetic surgery/procedure, 69–70, 89–90, n.201 Bell, David, 94, 116 Belsey, Catherine, 8 Bend it Like Beckham, 44–50, 54, 164, n.200 The Biggest Loser, 71, n.201 Bildungsroman, 30–1, 122 The Birdcage, 172, n.203 Black, Paula, 67–8 Bloch, Ernst, 37 body/bodies, 6, 14–6, 19–20, 23, 69 cultural construction of, 15, 31, 63 cyberbodies, 93–124 grotesque body, 32, 64, 183–5 maternal, 64–5 as object of gaze, 20, 42, 45, 52, 77–8, 153 as site of desire, 31, 39, 62–3 as site of personal investment, 70–1, 73 Bollywood, 46, n.200 Bordo, Susan, 70 Bougaeva, Sonja, The Visitor, 177–81 Boys Don’t Cry, 146 Bradford, Clare, 16, 24, 94, n.202 Braidotti, Rosi, 99 Brand, Peg, 71 Bratz dolls, 60, 68, 73 Briggs, Raymond, Fungus the Bogeyman, 80 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 62 Brooks, Ann, 13, 33, 34 Bryce, Mio, 122 Buchbinder, David, 4, 11 Bukatman, Scott, n.200 Burgess, Melvin, Sara’s Face, 69, 89–91 Butler, Judith, 5, 11–16, 41–2, 69, 78–9, 96, 100, 102–3, 110–14, 130–2 desire, 20–1, 25, 63

216

Index 217 heterosexuality, 18, 126, 128 kinship/marriage, 120, 139, 141–2, 144–5 melancholia/melancholy, 53, 174 norms, 111, 116, 136, 138, 192 phallus, 113–4, see also performativity camp sensibility, 160, 168 Carlson, D., 126 carnivalesque, 76, 157, 163–4, 177, 182–3, 185, 193 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail; humour Carter, Susan, 31 The Cat in the Hat, 158, 177, 182–6, 194 Chadha, Gurinder, 46, n.200 Chatterjee, Partha, 44 Crutcher, Chris, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, 85 Cohen, Leonard, 62 Cole, G. D. H., 125 comedy/comic, 156–94 camp humour, 157, 167, 194 irony, 159, 165, 178 kinging/king effect, 159, 167–76, 194 parody, 160, 167–8, 185, 193 see also humour Connell, R. W., 2 Coward, Rosalind, 43 Creed, Barbara, 186 Cronenberg, David, 94, 96 see also Existenz cross-dressing, 160–7, 193 Culler, Jonathon, 3, 7, 9, 10, 14–15, 197–8 cyberpunk, 93–4, 97 cyborg, 93, 95, 101, 116–24 Dahl, Roald, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 70 Daileader, Celia, n.200 Davis, Kathy, 69 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 59–60, 66, 79, 91–2 Dennett, Daniel, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, 106–7, 109

Denny, Dallas, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 13 desire, 12, 17–21, 25–6, 28–58, 62–4, 67, 88–91, 113–14, 139, 158–9, 168, 177, 187–90 Deleuze/an, 17, 79, 150, 197 desire for recognition, 41, 57, 110, 197 Lacanian, 17, 32, 38–9, 150, 197, n.200 queer, 21, 148–50, 153 Devereaux, Mary, 71 Dickie, George, 59, n.202 Dickinson, Peter, Eva, n.201 Dickemann, Jeffrey, 137, n.202 Downard, Barry, The Race of the Century, 159, 168–71 Dudek, Debra, 198 Eagleton, Terry, 8, 64 Elam, Diane, 37, 43 Eng, David, 143–4 Existenz, 93–124 see also Jaspers, Karl; Cronenberg, David Fairclough, Norman, 6 Faludi, Susan, 33, 34 Feelings, Tom, The Middle Passage, 23, 60 feminism, 2, 4, 12–13, 18, 32–4, 53, 63, 79, 90–100, 190 cyberfeminism, 13 First Wave, 12 and the media, 33–4 monstrous feminine, 186 postfeminism, 2, 13, 28–58, 61–3, 68, 76, 99–101 Second Wave, 2, 12–13, 35, 61, 190 Third Wave, 12–13, 34–5, 190 femme fatale, 20, 40, 151 Finding Nemo, 129, 137–41, 144–5 Fine, Anne, Bill’s New Frock, 16 Alias, Madame Doubtfire, 16, 160 see also Mrs Doubtfire Flanagan, Victoria, 16, 21, 136, 160 Foucault, Michel, 14, 17–18, 25, 126, 177, 179 French, Emma, n.203

218

Index

Freud, Sigmund, 19, 39, 59 Friedman, Natalie, 48 Fucking Åmål, 25 see also Show Me Love Gamble, Sarah, 32–3, 35 genetic engineering, 16, 101, n.201 Gibson, William, Neuromancer, 93 Giddens, Anthony, 38 Gill, Rosalind, 63, 74, 76 Gimlin, Debra, Body Work: Beauty and Self Image in American Culture, 73 Goble, Mark, 97 González, Jennifer, 122 Greer, Germaine, 34 Grosz, Elizabeth, 5, 13, 18, 39 Griffiths, Andy, The Day My Bum Went Psycho, 157 Bumageddon, 157 Zombie Bums from Uranus, 157 Guattari, Felix, 17, 79, 91–2 Gwynne, Phillip, Deadly Unna?, 22 Hagman, George, 84 Halberstam, Judith, 94, 111, 138–9, 145, 167–8, 170, 173–5 Hall, David, 21, 127, 135, 150, 155 Hall, Donald, 159 Hammer, Rhonda, 35 Haraway, Donna, Manifesto for Cyborgs, 93, 109, 115–17, 120, 124 Hayles, Katherine, 15–16, 115–17, 120, 124 hermaphrodism, 131–2, 137 heteronormativity, 16, 129, 160–1, 191–3 heterosexuality, 13, 18, 24, 27, 31, 120, 125–6, 128, 141 crisis of, 159–176 heterotopia, 177, 179, 182, 194 Hetherington, Kevin, 177 Heyes, Cressida, 129 Holmlund, Chris, 77 homophobia/homophobic, 2, 118, 121, 126 homosexuality, 18, 24, 126–7, 140, 142, 153–4, n.200

hooks, bell, 24 humour, 45–6, 64–6, 80, 84, 128, 137, 157–8, 160–1, 167, 177, 182, 187, n.202 gross, 157, 182 scatological, 157 anal jokes, 157 see also comedy; carnivalesque Hunt, Peter, 6 Hutcheon, Linda, 158–9, 165, 182, 193 identity, 7–10, 14–15, 21, 27, 29–30, 62, 69, 88, 97, 100, 107, 117, 126, 145, 150, 160, 162, 181 gendered, 15, 31, 102, 104–5, 113, 123, 148, 185 identity makeover, 90 moral, 119 and place, 45, 48, 130 racial, 22, 122 sexual, 1, 21, 102, 113, 123, 125–55, 135, 137, 154, 175 virtual, 104 see also subjectivity; performativity; queer Irwin, Bindi, Bindi Kidfitness, 70 Issacharoff, Michael, 158 Jaspers, Karl, 94, 97, 116 see also Existenz Johnson, Merri Lisa, Third Wave Feminism and Television, 35–6 Juno/Juno, 158, 177–93 Katz, Alan, The Flim Flam Fairies, 77, 80–4, 182 Kellner, Douglas, 35 Kemp, Gene, The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler, 1, 15–16, 25 Kennedy, Barbara, 66, 101 Kidd, Kenneth, 21, 29 Kincaid, Jamaica, Lucy, 53–7 Kinky Boots, 172, n.203 Kincaid, James, 60, 75 Kirkup, Gill, 116 Kolko, Beth, Race in Cyberspace, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 14, 77, 80, 83, 186 see also abject Kumars at No. 42, n.200

Index 219 La Farge, Benjamin, 156, 157, 159 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 189, n.200 Law of the Father, 18 see also desire Langbauer, Laurie, 51–2 Lars and the Real Girl, 96 Lawrinson, Julia, Obsession, n.202 Lefebvre, Benjamin, 21 lesbian, 13, 20–1, 31, 45–7, 49, 114, 126, 140, 146, 148–51, n.200, n.202 The Little Mermaid, 73, n.201 Little Miss Sunshine, 73–7 Litton, Joyce, 50 Livingstone, Ira, 94, 111 loathly lady, 30–2, 34 Luhrman, Baz, n.202 Ma Vie en Rose, 146, n.202 MacFarlane, Geoff, 140 MacLeod, Doug, Tumble Turn, 171–6 Mahlis, Kristen, 55 Mallan, Kerry, 20, 21, 23, 158 The Man with Two Brains, n.201 manga, 122–3, n.202 Marchenko, Michael, 33–4 Martin, Michelle, 8 McGillis, Roderick, 84, 157 McInally, Kathryn, 18 Meagher, Michelle, 77–9, 84 Meyer, Stephanie, The Host, 106–15 Twilight, 106 Miler, D.A., 127 Mills, Alice, 157, 198 Miss Bimbo, 71–3, 76 Misson, Ray, 10, 17–18, 18, 36, 60–1, 196 Modleski, Tania, 32 Moore, Perry, Hero, 116–21 Moravec, Hans, Mind Children: The future of robot and human intelligence, n.201 Morgan, Wendy, 10, 17–18, 36, 60–1, 196 Mrs Doubtfire, 16, 160 see also Fine, Anne Mulvey, Laura, 19, 40, 73, 78, 162

Munsch, Robert, The Paper Bag Princess, 33–4 Negra, Diane, 37 Negrin, Llewellyn, 69 Nelson, Claudia, 8 Ommundsen, Wenche, 198 Ostrey, Elaine, n.201 Pacteau, Francette, 59, 92 Pawuk, Michael, 122 performativity/performative, 5, 14, 21, 24, 27, 36, 55, 65, 69, 96, 101, 104, 107, 109, 123, 126, 128–31, 139, 147, 151, 158–9, 161, 165, 181, 187, 191, 197–8 drag performance, 103, 136, 160, 167 gender performance, 5, 9, 14–16, 51, 69, 102, 103–4, 132–3 see also Butler, Judith; identity; queer Pearce, Lynn, 36–7, 43 Pearce, Sharyn, 8 Pennell, Beverley, 21 Peters, Julie Anne, Luna, 146–51 Pinar, Bill, 23 pleasure, 9, 17, 28–58, 61, 66, 82, 106, 118, 124, 158–60, 176–93, 198 bodily pleasures, 57, 100, 114 guilty pleasures, 35, 38, 159 jouissance, 80 politics of, 35–6 visual/viewing pleasures, 19–20, 73–4, 79, 159, 166, 172, 184 Pocahontas, 73, n.201 Polan, Dana, 60 posthuman, 16, 93–4, 97–8, 106–124, n.201 Pouchard, Line, 125 power, 5, 10, 12–3, 20, 22, 30, 71, 102, 106, 160, 175, 179, 182–90 regulatory, 110–11, 115 superpower, 116–20, 124 Pung, Alice, Unpolished Gem, 53–8

220

Index

queer, 114, 125–55, 161–2, 164, 181 community, 139 diaspora, 143 queerness, 113, 129, 133–4, 143, 145–6, 150 readerly approach, 21, 27, 127–8, 145, 147 texts, 21, 127, 129, 146, 153 theory, 13, 20–1, 126 –7, 129, 132, 135, 150 see also subjectivity; identity race, 12, 22–4, 31, 46, 54, 63, 111, 116, 121–4, 186 Ramanathan, Geethan, 73–5 Ramsey, JonBenét, n.201 Rayban, Chloë, 96–9, 105, 113, 115, Virtual Sexual Reality, 96–7, 100, 102–5 Love. in Cyberia, 96–100, 105 Terminal Chic, 96–102, 105, 121 Real Women Have Curves, 77–80, 82–3 Reeve, Phillip, Mortal Engines, 85 Rich, Adrienne, 13 Richardson, Justin, And Tango Makes Three, 129, 140–1 Rifkin, Mark, 141 Robertson, Pamela, 159 Rodgers, Mary, Freaky Friday, 60–1, n.200 romance fiction/narrative, 28–58, 140, 151–2, 191, 193, 197, n.200 Medieval, 29–30 popular romance, 36, 43, 56 Rosoff, Meg, What I Was, 146, 151–4 Roughgarden, Joan, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, 131–2, 137–41, 143, n.202 Rowe, Kathleen, 156 Rowley, Hazel, 39 Sailor Moon, 115, 121–4 Salih, Sara, 13–4, 22, 126 Sato, Kumiko, 122–3 Saunders, Corinne, 29, 44 Saville, Jenny, 77 Schwartz, Hillel, 93

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 14, 114 Selden, Raman, 126 Sells, Laura, 20 Sendak, Maurice, Where the Wild Things Are, 29 sex, 2, 11, 13–14, 24, 36, 39–40, 46, 52, 57, 78, 102, 104, 106, 108, 126, 129–32, 135, 137, 141, 160, n.202 same–sex desire, 114, 128 sex change, 137 Sex and the City, 43, 100 Shakespeare, William, 157–8, 160, 162, n.200 She’s the Man, 158–76, 193, n.200 Shearer, Alex, The Speed of the Dark, 85 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 89 Shrek, 30–1, 36, 80 Show Me Love, 25 see also Fucking Åmål Siegel, Carol, 190 Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, 79 Sky High, 116–21, n.201–2 Sontag, Susan, 160 Springer, Claudia, 97 Stephens, John, 8, 14–16, 21, 25, 103, 118, 122 Stone, Allucquere Rosanne, 104 subjectivity, 8–10, 15, 17, 20, 25, 30–2, 54–5, 62–3, 76, 78, 131–3, 139, 167, 197, 199 and community, 108, 124, 143 see also agency; identity; queer Sugg, Katherine, 56 Takeuchi, Naoko, 122 Tasker, Yvonne, 19, 23, 37 Tatar, Maria, 185 transgender, 99–106, 128–48 see also transsexual transsexual, 21, 25, 129, 131, 146, 148, n.200 see also transgender Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 21, 24, 31 Troughton, Joanna, Sir Gawain and the Loathly Damsel, 28, 29, 36 Tulloch, Scott, Willy’s Mum, 63–7 Twelfth Night, 158, 160, n.202

Index 221 violence, 2, 25, 41, 111–12, 145, 147 festive violence, 182, 185 virtual reality/technologies, 26, 71–2, 93–102, 104, 106, 116, 121, 124, n.201 see also alternative reality Walkerdine, Valerie, 68 Wersba, Barbara, Whistle Me Home, 44, 50–3 Westerfeld, Scott, Uglies, 84–9 Pretties, 85, 86, 195 Specials, 85 Whelehan, Imelda, 56 Whiteside, Anna, 158

Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine, 18 Wilson, Robert, 93 Winnubst, Shannon, 22 Wittig, Monique, 14 Wittlinger, Ellen, Parrotfish, 129–37, 147–8 Hard Love, 148–51 Wolf, Naomi, 35, 43 Wolff, Janet, 63 Zeigesar, Cecily von, You Know You Love Me, 36–44 Žižek, Slavoj, 95 Zuckerman, Diana, 69, n.201 Zurbo, Matt, Idiot Pride, 85

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