BOOKS
Looking beyond our narrow definitions of sex and gender
by Andrea L.T. Peterson
As the world with all of its high-tech gadgets becomes increasingly easier, everyday life seems to become more and more complex. Take for example, the gender categories that most of us have taken for granted since the day the Ob/Gyn delivered us into our parents' anxiously waiting arms and assigned
Minnie Bruce Pratt
DOUG LAWSON
us a gender. Simple: male or female. Right? Wrong!
In her newest book, S/He, essayist, theorist, poet, and self-identified femme Minnie Bruce Pratt discusses her ideas about gender and what might safely be termed "gender uncertainty" into the ever expanding pot of genderbending complexities.
“The word woman,” Pratt realized, “did not adequately describe the twists and turns our bodies, our lives, took through sex and gender." From her own early coming-out experience in the 1970s, when short hair, combat boots, and fatigues were the customary dress for many lesbians, butch or femme, questions of rigidly defined gender roles have been incessantly questioned by Pratt.
"The last time I went home,” she writes in S/He, "I introduced my new love. I had taken as a mate a woman so stone in her masculinity that she could, and did, sometimes pass as a queer man; a woman so transgendered that someone at one end of a city block could call her "Ma'am," and someone at the other end would call her "Sir.” Her partner, Stone Butch Blues author Leslie Feinberg, is someone that "really identifies as a woman but who has a masculine gender expression,” according to Pratt.
The complexity of the situation was becoming increasinly clear to her.
Over the years she has spent much time considering how "we get to be the person who lives in those [culturally defined gender roles], assessing just how many stops there must be along the way on the “genital sexuality” continuum, and accepting just how little "people really look at us..." employing a very limited number of ways "with which they slot people." Slotting, she maintains, is a way to "quickly erase ambiguities."
S/He is Pratt's attempt to encourage people to look more carefully, and to exorcise some of those demon-like naggings posed by society's narrow definitions and the broad spectrum of sexuality Pratt has witnessed in the flesh.
Taking a closer look at the "issues of social conditioning, how we are trained to be male or female," Pratt makes clear the point that “biological sex is a lot more mutable than we think," or than some would like to think. "The possibilities are infinite, the exploration is loaded with inconsistencies, and there are no clear answers," she writes.
"We've been talking about sex/gender as separate from 'nature' for a really long time,” she says. Feminism in the '70s, she argues, "tried to untangle all of that-sex, gender identity, and gender expression—to separate maleness and femaleness from sexual preference, social roles, and job eligibility based on perceived gender.
Women's liberation didn't accomplish it— the untangling-nor did lesbian and gay lib-
eration, or queer theory. "Transgender theory," she believes, "is the missing piece."
Pratt is not alone in asking "why do people label male and female.” People seem driven to classify individuals as one or the other. "We are not [one or the other]," says Pratt, who is genuinely awed by the endless possibilities. She and Feinberg prefer to speak of "gender spirit," a term that encompasses the “totality of a persons gender expression.”
Having fought off the "negative values we grew up with" about femininity, Pratt, who "certainly identified as a femme, probably since childhood,” has finally, in the last few years, become really comfortable with what she refers to as her "unambiguous femininity."
Like so many other lesbians, Pratt had to struggle to find her place on the gender spectrum, and other people's labels didn't make it easy, she contends.
Born and schooled in Alabama, she eventually moved to North Carolina to attend college. While there, she discovered a small gay bar in Fayetteville and began the decades-long process of figuring out for herself, "How to do this...how do you be a lesbian?...a woman? If you reject patterns of female submission—— but are femme, in a culture that devalues femininity?"
Twenty-some years ago when she came out, there was a certain amount of “you should," in terms of behavior surrounding coming out, but there were no models anywhere. Pratt was pretty much on her own.
Pratt's collection of essays pulls no punches. It blatantly confronts stereotypes and confining societal definitions of such things as masculine/male and feminine/female, while exploring and crossing back and forth over the boundaries of the two.
She also pulls no punches when discussing sexuality—in concept and in practice. “This," she says of her book, “is really a very sexy and sensual book."
Reading S/He may border on voyeurism for the more prudish. Pratt believes that "we should be talking about sex more." She acknowledges readers might experience a “horrified fascination" when reading S/He, which Pratt says is "full of juice and smells and color, full of people's lives."
But, she explains, there is "so much shame" around sex, and around women desiring and enjoying sex-shame Pratt has worked long and hard to overcome. She had to work hard to "come into my identity as a femme, as a woman, a sexual person... not the person she was raised to be, [but] a woman who likes sex and says, "This is what I want."
Through S/He, she explains, “I wanted to come out from a lot of the shame dumped on me as a woman and as a femme.” Her writing, she feels, "is deeply rooted in my upbringing-white, segregationist, deep South...shut down and characterized by secrecy. "My life work," she concludes, "is to overturn that... to address boldly and without shame these things we've been told we should not speak of."
Pratt agrees that her book of prose stories about "gender boundary crossing" will no doubt again "piss off" North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who included her name on his list of pornographic artists" after a previous book, Crime Against Nature, was published by Firebrand Books. That collection of poems about her relationsip as a lesbian mother and her two children had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
S/He will also more than likely inspire much discussion and heated debate about roles, gender identity, stereotyping, and even questions about the essence of personhood and "gender spirit."
Gender and transgender issues are among the most frequently and hotly debated in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities, as well as in the mainstream, as evidenced by the fascination with and the popularity of such films as The Crying Game. Pratt, in addition to speaking at the February Out Write conference in Bostn, will be touring extensively throughout the eastern and the central United States throughout the
summer.
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