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force from the traditional belief that gender never changes. Adam delved and Eve span, Men must work and Women must weep, Boys will be Boys. Serious analysis begins with the recognition that exactly the opposite is true: everything about gender is historical. (Connell, 2002, p. 68, italics in the original)

Introduction

When studying gender and feminism, it is common to distinguish between the concepts of “sex” and “gender”. Whereas sex is based on anatomy, gender is both a personal identity and an outward performance which is dependent on social context. According to Judith Butler, “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result” (1990, p. 25). Gender is thus a social construct, which has little to do with biological differences, but is rather determined by the way society expects people of a certain gender to act and dress.

In contrast, the concept of sex seems to be far simpler and more natural, as it is determined by physical characteristics. However, sex is also a social construct. Social norms determine which body parts are considered “male” and which are considered “female”, and people whose bodies do not fit neatly within these categories are either ignored or surgically altered to be more socially acceptable. As Butler expresses it,

“sex” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce – demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls. Thus, “sex” is a regulatory ideal whose materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, “sex” is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. (1993, p. 1)

The social tendency to divide people into the categories of “male” and “female” is known as the “gender binary”. This division is mainly based on people’s genitalia, so that people with vaginas are called females, and people with penises are called males, except that – as mentioned above – this ignores a wide variety of gender identities and expressions, as well as biological

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formations. While there are numerous cultures that recognise more than two genders (see, for example, Chang, 2001; Allen, 2008; Williams, 2010), Western colonialism made the gender binary the most commonly accepted way of perceiving gender, often by violently enforcing it in those cultures under its dominion (Deerinwater, 2017). Despite this, many people in Western society seek to break free from this prescriptive view by using different definitions of both gender expression and gender itself.

Rebecca Rabinowitz writes about how literary critics can transcend the gender binary in their analyses of gendered characters:

Although many gender studies powerfully probe multiple literary messages about what it means to be each gender, both feminist analysis and new masculinity explorations... often leave behind the space inbetween – the neithers, the boths, the incoherencies. Queer theory endows these spaces in between with significance. (2004, p. 20).

She goes on to assert that queer critics consider these “incoherencies” to be proof “that the very structures and definitions of gender and sexuality are rickety” (p. 20), which is what sets a queer analysis apart from a traditionally feminist one.

Fantasy provides an ideal arena for this type of exploration. Unlike realist fiction, characters in fantasy are not necessarily tied to their bodies and, through shapeshifting, possession, or reincarnation, can find themselves in bodies that are not their own. As Rosemary Jackson points out, “[m]etamorphosis plays a large part in fantastic literature”, and as examples she cites “[m]en transforming into women” and “children changing into birds and beasts” (1995, p. 81). Additionally, authors can introduce species with different conceptions of gender than the Western gender binary dictates. Devices like these can examine the stability or instability of a character’s gender identity and determine how it relates to the character’s self-image. Jackson says that many of the themes in fantasy are, indeed,

concerned with erasing rigid demarcations of gender and of genre. Gender differences of male and of female are subverted and generic distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral are blurred in fantasy’s attempt to “turn over” “normal” perceptions and undermine “realistic” ways of seeing. (p. 49)

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In this chapter I will examine gender expressions that transgress the boundaries of a “cisnormative” gender binary. When discussing this subject, literary critics and scholars of gender studies tend to treat it in a theoretical manner, Judith Butler’s prose often being cited as particularly difficult and abstruse. She was, for example, the 1998 winner of Philosophy and Literature’s annual “Bad Writing” competition. Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, spent a whole article criticising not just Butler’s style, but also its implications for practical change. As Nussbaum complained, theoreticians such as Butler “do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture” (1999, p. 45). Unfortunately, as she continues, “[h]ungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it” (p. 45). As noted at the end of the previous chapter, transgender people are also a high-risk category when it comes to hate crime. And, aside from this, there is the fact that transgender people and others on the LGBT spectrum are more likely to suffer the hardships of poverty and lack of education, making them less likely to encounter, let alone understand, the theoretical ideas of academics like Butler. Brad Sears and Lee Badgett cite the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which finds that “transgender people are four times as likely to have a household income under $10,000 and twice as likely to be unemployed as the typical person in the U.S.” (2012, unpaged). The rates of poverty for transgender people of colour are even higher than for white transgender people.

Despite these factors, Butler claims that this kind of abstruse language is necessary to deconstruct concepts of gender, while blaming complaints about her prose style on “an upsurge of anti-intellectualism in the academy” (2004, p. 328). This implies that only people with advanced degrees in formal education are qualified to consider the subjects of gender identity and gender presentation.

Additionally, works that specifically study transgender people often seem voyeuristic and fetishistic. As transgender activist Riki Ann Wilchins writes, gender studies texts written by cisgender academics "escalate the politicization of our bodies, choices, and desires, so that, with each new book, while their audience enjoys the illusion of knowing more about us, we find ourselves more

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disempowered, disembodied, and exploited than before" (quoted in Samuels, 2002, p. 69).

This is where transgender activists are invaluable in making such ideas accessible to all. For example, Sophie Labelle, whose work I refer to below, shares her views on transgender issues in the forms of comic strips and picture books. Like Butler, she points out the artifice of the gendered structures of society, but does so in a way that makes it clear how real people are affected by them, and what can be done to make it easier for children to explore their identity and their gender expression.

What sets my analysis of gender apart is that, as a transmasculine person, I do not have the luxury of treating transgender people as merely a fascinating concept or the subject of a thought experiment. Rather, I will consider not only how the texts under scrutiny portray gender transgression, but also how they might affect actual transgender readers. I will also attempt to take into account the writings of other transgender scholars and activists in my analysis, although – because of marginalisation – they are harder to find than writings by cisgender scholars. Thus, I aim to suggest that a purely cisgender perspective is often insufficient to analyse texts that deal with gender identity. My intersectional approach will also include considerations of other axes of marginalisation to examine how breaking gender barriers might be easier for some people than for others. This analysis will focus on notions of whiteness, of class, and of disability within the books under consideration and within the queer community at large, and will show that the attempts at “queering” within my primary texts are limited, due to their lack of intersectionality.

First I will explore instances of cross-dressing, where characters temporarily pretend to be a different gender, and analyse what these narratives reveal about gender performance. Then I will look at depictions of bodies that transgress gender categories. This section includes representations of bodies that change shape, or are created through magic rather than biology, as well as examining various bodiless entities. This theme is explored further in a section on ghosts. Most of the ghost characters are shown to have lost their sense of self, including their gender identity. This type of gender representation raises further questions about what gender means and where it resides.

But before I begin this discussion, it will prove useful to explain some of my terms.

170 The Politics of Gender Terminology

When describing transgender individuals, common phrases include “a man in a woman’s body” or “a woman who used to be a man”. These descriptions are misleading, and do not convey how most transgender people feel about their gender and their bodies. The former phrase implies that our bodies are not really our own, and that those bodies are “wrong” somehow. The Canadian transgender activist Sophie Labelle expresses this view more personally, stating: “I wasn’t ‘born with a boy’s body’. I am a girl and my body is mine. So it’s a girl’s body… I was born in the right body. It’s the way people look at it that is wrong” (2018). Similarly, saying that a transgender woman is “a man who became a woman” reduces gender to outward physical characteristics, and to a simplistic binary, one might say, ignoring the reality of those transgender people who have no desire or opportunity for medical transition, but still feel strongly about their gender identity. As Butler points out in the quotation above, speaking of biological sex can also be reductive, especially when considering intersex people, who are either born with ambiguous genitalia, or whose outward genitals do not match their internal organs and/or chromosomes.30

Thus the terms designated – or assigned – male/female at birth are more accurate and inclusive of all genders and sexes. These terms refer to the gender that is ascribed to a child by doctors and parents when it is born, rather than to a person’s actual gender.

People who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth are cisgender, or cis for short, while people who do not are transgender, or trans. This latter, umbrella term covers not only trans men and trans women, but also those whose identity is a mixture of male and female, or even something completely different (genderqueer or non-binary), those whose gender is fluid (genderfluid), and those who do not feel they have a gender at all (agender).

Cross-Dressing

The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism by Sarah Gamble defines cross-dressing as “a range of behavior which involves adopting the uniform of the opposite sex: although their motivations may differ widely, drag

30 _{According to a study by Blackless, et.al. (2000), up to 2% of the human population may be} intersex, but around 0.1-0.2% of children receive “corrective” genital surgery at birth.

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queens, female impersonators, transsexuals,31 _{transvestites and butch}

lesbians are all cross-dressers” (2001, p. 209, bold in the original). However, this description is somewhat loaded, not only because it implies that transgender people are merely dressing up, but it also seems to imply that there is such a thing as dress that is intrinsically male or female, so that individuals who move outside their allotted range are pretending to be something they are not. Stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, who famously wears dresses and make-up, once said in an interview: “Yes, I wear dresses. They’re not women’s dresses. I buy them” (2011, italics added). Thus, he rejects the gendering of clothes. Gamble’s definition also ignores the reality of intersex and non-binary people, who are not strictly male or female. Accordingly, in this section on cross-dressing, I will specifically talk about characters pretending to be a different gender for story purposes, rather than female characters who prefer clothes traditionally considered masculine or vice versa.

There is a marked difference between portrayals of female cross-dressers and male ones. As Victoria Flanagan writes:

For females, the cross-dressing experience is liberatory. It exposes the artifice of gender constructions, permitting the female cross-dresser to reconstruct for herself a unique gendered niche which is not grounded within a single gender category, but incorporates elements of both... . (2002, p. 79)

Male cross-dressers, on the other hand, do not normally lose themselves in the female experience, and rarely learn a lesson about gender performance. As Flanagan continues:

The masculinity of male cross-dressers is seldom as fragile as the femininity of female cross-dressing subjects, nor is it as easily forsaken. Because their behaviour presupposes the superiority of masculine over feminine, their self-assured masculinity permeates every aspect of their cross-dressing experience, rendering comic their

31_{Transgender terminology has changed in recent years, and the term “transsexual” has mostly} fallen out of use, as it focuses on sexual characteristics rather than gender identity. Nowadays most transgender people regard “transsexual” as a slur. As the Routledge Companion is over a decade old, I do not blame Gamble for using the wrong terminology. What is more distressing is the fact that in her entry on “transsexualism” (pp. 328-329), she repeats the openly transphobic views of Germaine Greer and other trans-exclusionary feminists. As she also briefly quotes Sandy Stone – a transgender writer – Gamble might think she is being fair by presenting both sides of the argument. Instead she treats transgender lives as a subject for debate, and legitimises transphobia as a valid position.

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inability to comprehend femininity as separate to their own biologically male experience of gender. (p. 79)

Thus, for girls, cross-dressing can be a liberating experience, allowing them to do things they would normally not be able to do, whereas boys usually treat cross-dressing as a joke. The difference lies in how society views masculinity and femininity. As masculinity is viewed as superior to femininity, a boy dressing or acting in a way considered “girly” is seen to be debasing himself. This makes it difficult for children who are assigned male at birth to explore their gender identity seriously, even if they like aspects of femininity and would find them as liberating as the female cross-dresser might find aspects of masculinity (Flores, 2015). As Madonna Kolbenschlag writes:

Because the masculine role is dominant and associated with superior status, deviation from it by males is less tolerated. Girls, on the other hand, belong to a class of “outsiders,” a group that has inferior status in the cultural paradigm. Like members of minority groups, they often show greater adeptness in role changes and are more psychologically free to experiment. (1988, p. 11)

Besides allowing female characters to break free from strictly gendered bonds, cross-dressing narratives also serve to break the bonds of the gender binary itself. As Flanagan says: “Cross-dressing is used strategically to make the socially constructed nature of gender apparent” (2010, p. 33).

In my primary texts there are three main reasons for cross-dressing: to overcome gendered oppression, to ensure personal protection, and to deceive others. The most notable cross-dressing character with the first of these three motives is Alanna from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet (1983- 1988). The first book in the series, aptly named Alanna: The First Adventure (1983), starts with Alanna reacting in horror to her father’s decision to send her to a convent to teach her to become a lady. She sees this as a waste of her abilities and a restriction of her potential: “As if that’s all I can do with myself!” (p. 1), she says scornfully. Her twin brother, Thom, is to be sent off at the same time to become a knight, even though he would much rather study magic. To serve both their interests, the children decide to switch places. Alanna cuts her hair, puts on her brother’s clothes, and spends the rest of her adolescence pretending to be a boy named Alan, so that she can become a knight. As they set off to their respective locations, Thom wears one of Alanna’s dresses to fool

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their father and the servants, but he arrives at the convent as himself, a boy wishing to study magic, rather than a girl wanting to be a lady. So while he performs femininity for a short time to achieve his goal, he does not adopt a feminine persona in the way that Alanna adopts a masculine one; nor does he find fulfilment by taking on a traditionally female role. Although he is uncomfortable with the violence and physical activity involved in knighthood, magic is still a mostly male pursuit in his world, so he simply chooses a different type of masculinity; namely, a scholarly kind. When Alanna is asked whether Thom disguised himself as a girl, she laughs and responds, “Of course not!” (Pierce, 1986, p. 34). In line with Flanagan’s observations, Alanna finds the thought of her brother cross-dressing ridiculous, while her own experience of performing as a boy is serious. This is a bit of a missed opportunity in the text, as Pierce could have shown a true role reversal and presented femininity as a liberating experience for a male character.

The first two volumes of the series focus on Alanna’s attempts to perform masculinity in order to fit in with the boys she is training with. This involves, for example, not seeking help when she is bullied by an older boy, but dealing with the problem herself by training privately until she is skilled enough to defeat him in a fight. She does not seem to define masculinity primarily by violence, as at one point she says to her bully, Ralon, “I don’t have to pick on someone littler’n