“The Inner Ambiguities of Gender”

So we got another dose of Myra last Thursday—quite the performance, pun intended. I thought my roommate would pee herself or that I’d start snorting.  I found the humor in that scene this time for sure.

Anyway, to be serious and analytical, hearing the rape scene read aloud and acted out made me realize how much material I could work with.  You could probably do a whole paper on this scene alone.  Well, someone else could.  There were so many references and blatant statements that alluded to Myra’s desire to unman Rusty, to make him into a boy.  In other words, to exploit and take away his “masculinity,” or his power. 

I started reading sections of Kate Bornstein’s book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, and it’s clear how the author—someone who transitioned from a male to a female—finds herself and the queer population stuck in the confines of culturally constructed gender.  Like Myra, she becomes an activist, an agent for change, although not as sadistically as our film-obsessed protagonist.  Bornstein says that “culture is creating the gendered people” and that instead of “malevolent, divisive construct,” we should give each other time to build a conversation around gender (12).  In my draft I questioned why someone is seen as a man or a woman.  She confronts the same obstacle: “We talk casually about trans-gender without ever clearly stating, and rarely if ever asking, what one gender or the other really is” (55).  This reflects Myra’s New Woman manifesto.  She is Myra, the woman whom no man shall possess.  Bornstein quotes panelist and activist Craig Lewis: “Homophobia and misogeny are not related.  They are the same!  The man who makes an object of himself is beneath contempt.  The woman who refuses to be one must be stopped” (156).  Myra’s turning the tables on the former definition; she makes Rusty the object and manipulates him and Buck rather than being manipulated by them. 

She goes on to ask, “What are you being denied on account of your gender? What does a person of another gender have that you don’t have?” (81).  For Myra: power.  Ironically, Myron couldn’t achieve the power over others, particularly men, that often accompanies the stereotype of the male gender.  And Myra is using Rusty to avenge Myron for the torture that the penis—his and others—have inflicted upon him.  Bornstein herself remarks that gender has been medicalized, and that it “has little to do with the vagina.”  Rather, it’s about having a penis or not having one (22).  Myra is reworking this theory. 

Lastly, Bornstein says that we often “choose stereotypes as characters, then inhabit them as performers” (158).  Myra is not performing a stereotype, nor is she even performing as a woman.  She is a woman.  She has constructed herself, birthed her own self, and thus is a new type of woman.  I want to pursue the idea that drag can go beyond performativity, that you can become your own constructed self.

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