sexing the cherry – Lit & Theory: Queer Rhetorics Spring 2022

Thurs. 3/3

We covered quite a bit of ground in class on Tuesday – from Sexing the Cherry to camp to RHPS to Halberstam with some time for arts and crafts in between. Good job, everyone! I’m glad we’re back in the swing of things! 🙂

For today, I’ve asked you to read Kai Cheng Thom’s novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. Like Sexing the Cherry, this book features fantastical elements that are common to magical realism. As we discussed briefly in class, magical realism is a genre of fiction that is not quite fantasty/sci-fi, but rather one that features extraordinary circumstances in everyday life. Writers.com offers a great general explanation: “In magical realism, fantasy slips into everyday life; however, the focus isn’t on the fantastical elements of the story, but on what those elements mean for the characters” (Glatch). We can see that playing out in Thom’s book as the main character goes about her day living with bees inside her or other absurd situations.

In their description of the genre, BookRiot notes that magical realism is sometimes seen as “a genre of political subversion.” They write, “Essentially, magical realism is a chance for authors to show an alternative to an accepted reality, which can be an incredibly powerful tool” (Allmann). This should sound familiar – not only is it an echo of Butler’s take on the way drag artists turn heteronormativity on its head with subversive gender performance, but it also connects to the ways Halberstam writes about the importance of the “silly archive” or Sontag’s reverence for camp and its connection to queer culture. In all of these theorists’ work, outrageousness, in its many forms, can be an important, political act. Especially when talking about a community (LGBTQ+) that has not always been able to live out loud.

For your writing today, I’d like you to build connections between Thom’s book and some of the ideas about “outrageous subversion” (as I’ll call it for now) that I’ve outlined above. In 2-3 pages in a document in your Google Drive folder, point out a specific passage of the book and discuss how you see Thom using magical realism for political purposes. Why use fantastical elements in that moment? What does it lend to the story and narrative? Furthermore, where are you seeing connections to Halberstam, Butler, or one of the other theorists we’ve read so far in their discussions of heteronormativity?

We’ll be off next week for Spring Break! When we return, we’ll be discussing the connections between feminist theory and queer theory through readings of Glora Anzaldua, Sara Ahmed, and Roxanne Gay. See you all when we get back! 🙂

Thurs. 2/10

As some of you noted at the end of class on Tuesday: So much fruit in this book!! But hopefully that wasn’t too distracting and you were able to enjoy the complex story that unfurled throughout Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. The dual narratives of Jordan’s and the Dog Woman’s perspectives combined with the multiple timelines and re-told fairytales mean that there is a lot to unpack in a book that isn’t very long at all.

I chose to read this at this after finishing up our Butler readings because of the way Winterson plays with gender, the passage of time, and other heteronormative constructs. This is also a book about, among many other things, rebirth and renewal (hence the title, if anyone knows what it means to “sex” a plant in gardening terminology), and I think there’s a lot there that can be connected to drag culture and gender performativity.

For your asynchronous work today, I’d like you to do some reflective writing about the book’s connections to Butler. In 2-3 pages in a document in your Google Drive folder, reflect upon where we see Winterson playing with heteronormative concepts (gender roles, gendered stereotypes, etc.) in the book. How do we see characters living subversively and not adhering to heteronormative frameworks? How does the book itself push against norms – could we say that Winterson was “queering” the typical novel in some way as she put this book together? If so, how?

For Tuesday, we’ll be reading Halberstam on “low theory” and failure as we move into a section of the course on playfulness, humor, and campiness in queer theory. There’s some campiness in Sexing the Cherry, too, which we’ll discuss.