You’re a womanizer, baby: Remaking gender, bodies, and sex in Myra Breckinridge
Argument:
Myra works to shift gendered power dynamics by remaking the body and sexuality; she manifests this mission in the rape of Rusty. She is the New Woman who creates her own gender instead of performing it, does not conform to heterosexuality, and constructs her own body. Myra sees the body as gendered; the body is also a site of sexuality. Knowing this, she destroys Rusty’s body as a site of traditional masculinity by raping him.
Why?
To extend beyond Butler’s idea of gender
The body=key to making/breaking the sexualized self
Myra Says…
“In a sense, Rusty is a throwback to the stars of the Forties, who themselves were simply shadows cast in the bright morning of the nation. Yet in the age of the television commercial he is sadly superfluous, an anachronism, acting out a masculine charade that has lost all meaning. That is why, to save him (and the world from his sort), I must change entirely his sense of himself” (Vidal 117).
“To have so cowed my victim as to short-circuit his legendary powers as a stud was, psychologically, far more fulfilling than my original intention” (Vidal 147).
“I was one with the Bacchae, with all the priestesses of the dark bloody cults, with the great goddess herself for whom Attis unmanned himself. I was the eternal feminine made flesh, the source of life and its destroyer, dealing with man as incidental toy, whose blood as well as semen is needed to make me whole!” (Vidal 150).
Secondary Sources:
Judith Butler, “From Gender Trouble“: Gender is pastiche; it is performed on the surface of the body and never fully internalized.
Michel Foucault: “From History of Sexuality“: Sexuality is iscribed upon and imbedded within the body.
Susan Brownmiller: Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape: Rape is a demonstration of power through violence; exhibited by prison culture
Ann J. Cahill: Rethinking Rape: Rape a significant factor in forming the body and gendered experience. Subjectivity of women; women’s bodies are rapable.
Marjorie Garber: Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety: The penis is the center of the male’s subjectivity; the “absolute insignia of maleness.” Making a man versus making a woman.
The End!
