“Embodiments, Disorientations and Misalignments: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bodies of Work: Women in the Arts, 2010
This paper offers a broad-brush discussion of Angela Carter’s 1977 novel and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) in relation to the broader critical framework of Gender Studies, mainly by assuming a dialectical approach in the discussion of the fictional characters Tristessa, Eve(lyn) and Joss Moody. Carter’s novel is read alongside Baudrillard’s philosophical argument of simulation as formulated in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Butler’s notion of gender as performative. I then consider the characters in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and the construction of performative (trans)gender as a case of epistemic crisis that leads to a brief discussion of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’. Throughout, I seek to engage these texts with a broader discussion of gender practices as part of a biological ‘given’. Tangentially, this paper draws from current trends in transgender studies which envisage ‘gender blending’ practices as socially subversive and culturally enriching. NOTE: This is a very early essay published in a special issue of an online journal, Bodies of Work: Women in the Arts, which no longer exists. It is posted here with the sole intention to rescue it from digital oblivion.
Hypatia, 2010
In Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray gives a brilliant reading of Plato's cave analogy in which she suggests that the cave stands in for the womb as well as the confusing sensory experience of everyday life from which man must extricate himself and that he must ultimately deny if he is to attain the (illusory) clarity of rational contemplation of the world in terms of the forms . Insofar as contemporary approaches to ethics insist upon an autonomous moral agent clearly distinguishable from her world as well as from others and who is able to articulate her ethical choices in clearly defined categories subject to rational reflection and debate, they could be subject to a similar criticism of overlooking the ''messier'' aspects of embodied life and the conundrums they present. Feminist theory has long worked toward rectifying the lack of attention paid to the body in traditional philosophy, and it is the great merit of all three of the books under review here that they build upon this work in such evocative and compelling ways. Gail Weiss, Kim Atkins, and Penelope Ingram all offer conceptions of embodied living and moral agency that would have us rethink the relationship between language and the materiality of day-to-day life in ways that would productively destabilize entrenched notions of who we (and the other) are and allow us to engage in the reparative and selftransformative work of ethical living.
"Mirror, mirror on the wall": Bodies, Intersubjectivity and the Performativity of Identity.
The evil queen in the fairy tale ‘Snow White’ requires the confirmation of her magic mirror to be secure in her identity as ‘the fairest of them all’. Similarly, most people are to some degree dependent on the perceptions and reactions of others in order to both experience and enact their individual identities, and nowhere is this more evident than in the lives of gender diverse people. In this paper, I will engage with two texts – The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, and Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. My aim is to look at how individuals perform their gender identities in relation to their bodies in social interactions, the role their bodies play in eliciting the co-operation of other social actors, and the reception of those social actors of the individual’s performed identity as authoritative. I will argue that Goffman posits a ‘core self’ which is expressed and perceived in performance by means of the body of the social actor, whilst Butler can be seen to contend there is no ‘core self’, that identity is produced by means of performance on the surface of the body. Other social actors, who also constitute the audience for this performance, may affirm, challenge, or undermine the actor’s identity, according to its congruence with their expectations based on the body of the performer. In this way, many gender diverse people will feel the need to refashion their bodies, in order to both experience their identities, and have them accurately received by others.
This body which is not one: speaking an embodied self
Hypatia, 1991
This article argues against a conception of the body as providing a basis for truth claims within feminist discourse. Taking from Michèle Le Doeuffs theory of the work of the image within discourse, and Michel Foucault's “technologies of the self,” it is argued that the doubledness of the body (“who am I? and who is she?”) can be put to work to construct embodied enunicative positions within feminist theory.
This Abstract Body: The Self, the Body and Identity (1992)
In focusing on the body, this article seeks to consider two related themes. Firstly, it examines how bodily symbolism is part of a process of connecting and defining the self and the community. The easiest way to do this is comparatively, contrasting forms of embodiment in different contexts from tribalism to postmodern capitalism. This then allows us to broach a second theme: is the reconstitution of our lived senses of our bodies in contemporary western society stripping the body of its capacity to enrich the social connectedness of people? The current sense of an image-dictated, shapable body; the current debates over whether or not advances in medical technology are an unproblematic liberation from the constraints of our mortal bodies; and recent developments in feminist attitudes to embodiment will be considered to reveal the tensions and contradictions in the textured modem/postmodern constitution of the body. Our overriding concern is to argue through the need for alternative practices of human interrelation which attempt to bind considerations about the value or otherwise of the various modes of disembodied extension within a framework which instantiates in practice the condensed and complex limitations on embodiment entailed in face-to-face relations. This is not an argument for a return to kinship-based or close-knit parochial communities. Nevertheless, it asserts the ontological importance of relations of continuity, reciprocity and co-operation in which the constraints of embodiment are not simply impediments to be left behind as soon as is technologically possible.
Writing the Body: Kafka, Textuality, and Contemporary Theories of Embodiment
The goal of this paper was to take critical look at representations of the body as text or surface of writing and the implications of such metaphors in contemporary critical theory and gender studies. I considered the sacrificial transformation of the body through writing in Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony" in view of Foucault's political theorizing about the body, the notion of the signifying body in the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan, and finally the idea of the imprinted body for post-structuralist feminist critics, including Judith Butler. I ultimately argued that while problematic, the textual representation of the body as text may still hold promise for its very potential to complicate and destabilize interpretive strategies, by calling into question where the boundaries of the body are located, and thus the basis for any clear, discernible division between self and other.
FOLKLOR AKADEMİ DERGİSİ, 2024
In a multicultural sphere, adaptation and acculturation are intricate yet inevitable processes for the integration of a hybrid individual into the dominant society. Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, in his Location of Culture (1994), introduces the notion of a third space, wherein individuals’ struggles are elucidated through a wide array of elements, including hybridity, alienation, unhomeliness, ambivalence, in-betweenness, and mimicry. In this respect, this study aims to elucidate how Jackie Kay, an Afro-British poet, navigates her own odyssey within the Scottish context, where she is often perceived as an outsider despite her British upbringing and identity. In this regard, her poems “So You Think I am a Mule?” (1984), “Black Bottom” (1991), and “Hottentot Venus” (1998) are analysed within the framework of third space theory to underline to what extent and why a mixed-race poet creates hybrid personae within postcolonial settings. The seven-year intervals between these works also indicate shifts in Kay’s perspective as a Scottish person of colour. These autobiographical poems, featuring autobiographical speaking personae, reflect Kay’s evolving thoughts on being a hybrid individual in the white Western world. Viewed through a Hegelian lens, the poems function respectively as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, highlighting their significance both to one another and to Kay as a hybrid poet whose personae are on a journey to reconcile with their hybrid identities. The poems, which contain cultural components that mirror the sociocultural dynamic of each set, add a deep layer to the analyses concerning acculturation processes. In conclusion, this study aims to bring a new perspective to the cultural study of contemporary British poetry through a dialectical approach to Kay’s selected poems in a cultural context. Given the seven-year gap between each poem, the study intends to illustrate how Kay reflects on her hybridity and upbringing as an adopted child through her fictional personae and how the dialectic nature of the three poems involves the personas’ evolving attitudes toward hybridity in foreign lands.
Subjects, Identities, Bodies, and Selves
Some contemporary ecological fictions offer complex representations of their characters that can play an important part in developing a potentially less destructive form of human self-perception than the one dominant in the cultures in which these works are written. To understand those representations, I consider the four categories in my title in terms of a literary ecology grounded in the materiality of existence, showing how each one may be necessary but is insufficient to define an individual person. This analysis, ranging from postmodern theorists through genetic development systems theory and a variety of literary texts, leads to the conclusion that we are better served by the multiplicitous concept of being subject-identifiedbodily-selves rather than any singularity. ¤ Over the last few years and in the course of teaching a variety of environmental novels, I have had certain issues attract my attention that raise theoretical questions about the treatment of humans as agents and subjects in general, and