The terms ‘splitting’, ‘difference’, ‘pleasure’, ‘desire’, and ‘intersubjectivity’ are recognized aspects of fields of enquiry in their own right; but in their combination here, they locate this work predictably in the space of psychoanalytic gender criticism. ‘Gender’, however, is noticeably absent from my title and thereby hangs a complex set of questions, interrogations, and, let’s face it, trouble. The trouble with gender – to distort and borrow from Judith Butler’s seminal work (Butler, 1999) that unquestionably opened up the field of possibilities for the reconceptualization of gender in ways that no other work had previously managed to achieve – is that there appears to be little confidence or mutuality in its shared meaning. In this postfeminist, post-structuralist, post-millennial, post-individualist, post-guru period of the discipline’s discursive history (and with no small debt to the gurus themselves), one may wonder what is left to be said that is new or different about gender in children’s literature. Has the subject not already been discussed, analysed, interrogated, argued over, and critiqued to the limits? Are the debates not already exhausted in the welter of excellent works from eminent scholars in and out of the field: about the subject itself, about the subject position within the subject, about who is the subject of the subject and their relations to each other, and, indeed, what is understood, and by whom, about the subject we call gender? (See, for example, ‘infield’ works from Butler, 2008; Mallan, 2009; Flanagan, 2008; Rabinowitz, 2004; Stephens, 2002; Lehr, 2001; Norton, 1999; Kidd, 1998; and Trites, 1997).
It may come as no surprise, and at the same time it is every bit surprising, that a genre featuring children and young adults as its protagonists and target audience has, on one hand, exercised regulation and constraint in relation to such matters as the body of the child and, on the other hand, has leapt fearlessly and unflinchingly into this space of identity politics. The journey from the 1970s world of Judy Blume’s forays into the sexual activities of young adults, through Aidan Chambers’ 1980s narratives of young male homosexuality, to the millennial, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT), and often homo-erotic, worlds of Julie Anne Peters and her contemporary LGBT company of writers has been painfully slow (or, should I say, painful and slow?). But in the last decade or so, children’s literature has emerged as something of a trailblazer in the range and complexity of its LGBT narratives, of which the selection in this chapter is but a representative sliver. The clutch of children’s literature and film narratives I address has dared to venture into this tendentious space. I focus mainly on Julie Anne Peters’ Luna (2004), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1995), and Alain Berliner’s film Ma vie en rose (1997). I also include Joe Babcock’s The Boys and the Bees (2006). Each portrays the experience of a young child protagonist whose assigned bodily inscriptions are at odds with their felt and preferred identities, and whose ideas of self are more complex and more diverse than the standardized discourses of the child would have otherwise admitted.
By shifting the ground of gender away from its binary inscription in the male/ female divide of regulatory practices in social life, Butler raised the necessary questions about the relationship between the ‘materiality of the body to the performativity of gender’ and ‘how the category of “sex” figures within such relationships’ (Butler, 1993: p. 1). She criticized the discursive tendency to collapse ‘sex’ into ‘sexuality’ and to essentialize both: ‘As a result, the analysis of sexuality is collapsed into the analysis of “sex”, and any inquiry into the historical production of the category of “sex” itself precluded by the inverted and falsified causality’ (Butler, 1999: p. 121). By identifying what she called this ‘exclusionary matrix’ as the premise upon which the normative gendered subject is rendered visible, she thus simultaneously exposed a domain of ‘uninhabitability’ in social life occupied by what she identified as the ‘not yet subjects’ whose identities lay outside the defining limits of the binary (Butler, 1993: p. 3).
Butler’s work problematized the too simple waters of stable gender definitions by subjecting their fundamentalist assumptions to this repositioning of material bodies in social spaces as multiple and differently sexed, any permutation of which is figured as an unstable indicator or determiner of individual identity and performance. The implication of this particular economy of equivalence (which may be, even yet, aspirational and utopian) is that social, physiological, and psychoanalytical discourses are in conversation with each other: hierarchies of difference are dissolved; the term ‘gender’ as normatively understood is subsumed into sexuality and neither gender nor sex is fixed, either in relation to the other or to sexual identity; ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, are not reducible to normative categories that are positioned as naturalized at the extremes of the binary but are instead inscribed with equal status on the spectrum of multiple representations and identities. This is the space that has been so effectively occupied by queer discourse,1 summarized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as the drive to ‘Scramble and repudiate the definitional sex/gender boundaries ... The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances’ (Sedgwick, 1993: p. 8.). The queer thesis does not, however, seek to scramble difference into a homogenous soup, but, rather, to enter the space occupied by difference and hold differences in equivalence while sustaining, maintaining, and recognizing the discreteness of each. In its bid for the dissolution of the kinds of dualism that inaugurated and sustain an oppositional logic, it promotes a fully worked ethics of difference that is interpersonally, intrapersonally, intrapsychically, and intersubjectively negotiated. The ascendancy of the queer discourse has not only dismantled the imperialism of binarism but has also by default rendered normative gender definition discursively untenable as a vehicle for the complex territory of identity and behaviour that the field itself has laid bare. Gender, then, has effectively become an absent presence in the disciplinary field as it is an absent presence in my title, and in this work. This begs the question about the need for a different and new set of signifiers to locate differently nuanced identity categories. Nevertheless, ‘gender’ continues to be the signifier of choice in the discourses of this contested triad: of bodies, identities, and performativity. This is the ground on which the narratives in focus here are played out, and they do so, I believe, with a disarming capacity to mobilize in opposition to prevailing hierarchies by their beguiling frankness and unfettered ability to say it the way it is.
The child subjects (of whatever orientation) of children’s literature, whose fluid and transitional lived bodies and identities fall all too easily into this domain of ‘uninhabitability’, have emerged as an unsurprisingly rich site on which to focus and sharpen these debates. Nowhere are the debates more contentiously conducted, however, than over the bodies of young children; and it is the literature featuring especially young child protagonists that I have decided to focus upon here. Luna (2004) is narrated from the viewpoint of Liam’s younger sister, Regan, in a series of shifting time frames that move between present-day realities and their earliest childhoods told as (italicized) flashbacks. They reveal the transformation of Liam’s daytime identity as ‘Liam’ into his nighttime identity as ‘Luna’, ‘A girl who can only be seen by moonlight’ (Peters, 2004: p. 2). Funny Boy (1995) is set in 1970s Sri Lanka and is also narrated in the first person, and retrospectively by the now adult protagonist, Arjie, who recounts the ‘remembered innocence of childhood’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 5) and tells the story of his ‘transfiguration’ into ‘another, more brilliant, more beautiful self’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4) through his playing with his girl cousins their childhood game of ‘bride-bride’: ‘the culmination of this game, and my ultimate moment of joy was when I put on the clothes of the bride’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4). The French film Ma vie en rose focuses on seven-year-old Ludovic whose first appearance is as a reflection in a mirror through subjective camera focusing on the range of fetishized objects with which Ludovic is adorning himself with elegant hands: bejewelled earrings; necklace; lipstick-painted full, red lips. The action then cuts to a pair of slim feet wearing (his mother’s) too big red shoes, tripping downstairs to present himself (late) to the assembled guests at his parents’ garden party. Ludovic emerges in the form of an idealized Greek goddess, clad in a pink silky dress (his sister’s princess dress), and is viewed by the party guests (and by us, the viewers implicated in the male gaze2) as a freak, a comic turn, ‘The joker of the family’, his father announces.
These narratives break rank with the heterosexual imaginary that works to produce, uphold, and perpetuate an ideology of the child as gendered and normatively heterosexual but necessarily asexual; it is one of the most taboo, least discussed, most regulated, and least researched areas of child development (see Sedgwick, 1998; Kincaid, 2004). It is arguable that each of these child protagonists hovers on the cusp of an ambiguity over the question of child sexuality in the transgender identities portrayed. In every case, the process of the children’s redressing is unambiguously and subjectively sensual as they make their transition to their ‘other’ self that is unequivocally experienced as a source of bodily pleasure. Thus, Luna ‘shimmied in front of the mirror. The layered fringe on the dress she was wearing swayed in waves. ... Examining the length of herself, she hooked her long hair over her ears and wiggled her hips again’ (Peters, 2004: p. 1). Arjie recounts the moment of becoming dressed as the bride, ‘and then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki’s cracked full-length mirror – by the sari being wrapped around my body, the veil being pinned to my head, the rouge put on my cheeks, lipstick on my lips, kohl around my eyes – I was able to leave the constraints of myself’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4). He also recalls his experience of opening his grandmother’s jewellery box, ‘with a joy akin to ecstasy’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 15). The reflected image through the mirror of Ludovic’s slow process of adorning the erotogenic bodily zones – ears, lips, hands, feet – signals his unmistakable experience of jouissance at the point of his transition to his female self. For these children, dressing in this exaggeratedly stereotypical girly garb is not simply the experience of erotic frisson that is implied. Their particular choice of clothing and adornment is also an indisputable marker, a statement of their requirement and desire for social affirmation of a female self that would be otherwise erased, elided, or euphemized in and by any safe unisex clothing choices they might otherwise have made; it is both the sign of their desire for total immersion in the codes of femininity and their unwitting rejection of the politics of assimilation.
The debates provoked by the unspoken question of child sexuality oscillate in these narratives with the tensions, fears, and pathological anxieties between, on the one hand, individual child agency, and, on the other, a cast of adults and other child characters which embodies the institutional drive for the child to achieve what developmental psychology describes as ‘I-identity’ (coherence understood as normative). ‘I-identity’, as the drive to achieve a coherent sense of self, works in tandem with ‘s-identity’ (also understood as normative) and is constitutive of the child’s acquisition of community/intersubjective relations and sense of identity with others (Gallese, 2003). This ‘I-’/‘s-’identity dichotomy is just one site of the Self/Other split in the specular field, shifting between the points of observer and observed in which the child protagonists are caused to perform by turn within these familiar polarities as subject and object of the viewpoint. The very concept of intersubjectivity implies the inevitability of some level of relationship with the other – even if only insofar as the subject of intersubjectivity is able to conjecture that the other is a being outside the self – and is, therefore, inevitably structured between polarities of difference. Jessica Benjamin points to a third intersubjective position, however, that is arguably a less sophisticated version of the queer discourse but is distinctive in being located within the intersubjective space: one that is able, as she describes it, ‘to break up the reversible complementarities and hold in tension the polarities that underly them’ (Benjamin, 1998: p. xii). This particular stance informs her idea of a triadic relation in which self and other find a point of mediation in a third dimension that is the transcendent space. Judith Butler refers to this space as ‘the Other of the Other’ (Butler, 2004: p. 135). Benjamin refers in this context to the inevitable paradox of dyadic intersubjective relations: that if the other is also to be regarded as a desiring subject aspiring to a full subject position (like the self), it then follows that the other ‘will share our wish to affect, have impact on, transform others’ (Benjamin, 1998: p. xix). This is what she refers to as the ‘reciprocity of dialogue ... the risk of being transformed ... the common burden of subjectivity’:
The possibility of mutual recognition that survives negation. ... Symmetry is necessary in which both self and other own the burden of subjectivity, the tendency to assimilate or deny the difference of the other. (Benjamin, 1998: p. xix)
Intersubjectivity, in other words, in its unreconstituted dyadic state is rooted in difference, and it brings with it not only threat but also responsibilities and resistance. In its drive to achieve its own subjectivity, the other threatens to destabilize the supremacy of the gazing subject, provoking the need to sustain and protect the self in a reciprocal process.
But the intersubjective position is negotiated not only in relation to self and other but also between ‘self’ and ‘not self’, where the ‘not self’ relates to the splitting of the subject. In every case in these narratives, the children record their clear sense of experiencing another and quite different self that is only fully realized through and within their acts of cross-dressing. Their mirrored reflections behave as a metaphor for this experience of the split between ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ that is a normative experience of developing subject identity rendered more complex by transgender and transsexual subjectivities. Cross-dressing is not necessarily synonymous with transgender or transsexual identities – as a number of contemporary, cross-dressing subjects bear witness (the English artist Grayson Perry, for example). The act of cross-dressing itself is eroticized and is the raison d’être in such examples. Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out that ‘there is no such thing as the singular cross-dressed body; nor does it carry with it a univocal meaning’ (Goldberg, 1993: p. 11). Luna is unequivocal about the subject identity category distinctions for which Regan speaks on Luna’s behalf:
‘He’s a ... cross-dresser?’
‘No! God. Don’t call him that’... ‘It’s not the same. Liam’s dressing because he wants you to see what he is on the inside. His true identity. Hers, I mean. Luna’s’.
(Peters, 2004: p. 192)
‘He’s not gay,’ I said. ‘He’s trans. He’s not what he appears. He’ll show you. He’s going to change into her girl role. Except, it’s not really a role. It’s who he really is, Luna. Who she is’.
(Peters, 2004: p. 191)
Luna has developed a marker of this disjuncture between the self who is Luna by holding conversations – often angry – with her ‘not-self’, who is Liam, whom Luna repudiates and actively wishes to annihilate: ‘He’s talking to himself again. Conducting a conversation with an invisible being – someone other than me. He’s such a head case’ his sister, Regan, observes (Peters, 2004: p. 93). The name change is significantly and profoundly tied up with identity: Luna’s shift to Liam releases her from the tyrannies that structure and fix her identity as male and from the ‘baggage’ conferred by his maleness as Liam. Arjie has already spoken about his ascent into ‘another more brilliant, more beautiful self’ in the game of bride-bride (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4), and associates his separate selves with being located in two separate worlds: the everyday world of family and his playing world in the ‘girls’ territory’, for which he mourns after his family banishes him from the girls’ space and forbids him to play with them:
I glanced at the sari lying on the rock where I had thrown it and I knew that I would never enter the girls’ world again. Never stand in front of Janki’s mirror, watching a transformation take place before my eyes. No more would I step out of that room and make my way down the porch steps to the altar, a creature beautiful and adorned, the personification of all that was good and perfect in the world. (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 39)
In Ma vie en rose 1997, Ludovic’s ideal female Self is projected through a series of fantasy sequences onto a Barbie-like doll figure, ‘Pam’. Ludovic aspires to become Pam (not just to be like her), and he requires her as both the sublimated embodiment of, and his desire for, the absolute freedom and pleasure of instinct-satisfaction in the female self that is socially effaced by his little boy self. The intercut scenes depicting Ludovic with Pam are brightly etched in fairyland colours and feature Ludovic’s out-of-body female Self flying through the sky with Pam. There is no doubt in Ludovic’s seven-year-old understanding that he is a girl, and that his body will grow into full girlhood.
In these scenarios the clothing and the objects with which the child protagonists adorn their bodies function as ‘transitional phenomena’ in the Winnicottian sense, meaning that they are the pleasure objects that fixate the child’s projected desires. And the spaces of their individual transformation are inscribed as ‘the potential spaces’. Donald Winnicott designated the potential space as ‘intermediate zone’ situated between the ‘individual and the environment’ that is also synonymous with the scene of playing (Winnicott, 1971: pp. 135, 144). In the examples of Luna and Ludovic, the topographical markers of these liminal zones are the occluded spaces of, respectively, their sister’s and mother’s bedrooms. For Arjie it is both his grandmother’s bedroom and the ‘girls’ territory’ at the back of their grandparents’ house where he and his girl cousins are left alone to play all day away from the adults’ gaze. Ludovic’s potential space, as well as being the bedroom, is also located in the fantasy world of ‘Pam’, where he engages in what Winnicott has described as ‘fantazying’: a ‘dissociated’ state experienced, he says, by many ‘who do not feel that they exist in their own right’ (Winnicott, 1971: p. 39). Playing is also the location of inner and outer realities in which the child learns to identify the ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ phenomena. Winnicott points out that ‘It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child is able to be creative ... and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self’ (Winnicott, 1971: pp. 72–3). In these undisclosed and creative locations of the potential space, these children rehearse the self they believe themselves to be, with the significant twist that the preferred role they assume in ‘play’ is not coincidental with their ascribed role in a wider social reality. The domain of the potential space raises questions in this context about which, if any, of these ‘worlds’ is more ‘real’ or are as clearly demarcated as these binary role inscriptions suggest, or can be explained by the psychic split between self and not-self. Regan, again, speaks on behalf of Luna:
‘It’s horrible because you want to be this person you are in here,’ ... ‘But you can’t because you don’t look the way you should. You look like a guy. And that’s what people expect you to be. Every day you have to put on this act, play a role, and the only time you can ever be free is when you’re alone, when nobody’s watching and you can let yourself go. In your world, your private world you can present yourself the way you want the world to see you and treat you’. (Peters, 2004: pp. 191–2)
Arjie realizes his female Self through game-playing. In Ma vie en rose (1997) there is a ludic element in the party context in which Ludovic first appears wearing a dress and make-up. His appearance could be easily interpreted as fancy dress, and it explains, or conveniently excuses, his ambivalent reception by the party guests whose facial and bodily gestures of unease suggest that they are not at all sure whether Ludovic is playing or is serious about his dressing in a dress.
We see this dialectic of self versus other being played out in the narratives between the transgender children and the power figures struggling to uphold and protect their own inscription in heterosexual hegemony that is the source of so much misery for these protagonists. In this process, the three transgender children are subjected by turn to taunts and ridicule, are dismissed as a joke, or are excused for behaving as they do because ‘it’s all in good fun’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 50). Their immersion in the intersubjective space is, however, also the concomitant moment of exclusion from the regimes of heteronormativity and of their repudiation. Ludovic is negated in the gaze of his parents and their friends; Arjie is denounced as ‘a pansy’, ‘a faggot’, and ‘a sissy’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 11) by a girl cousin newly arrived to participate in the game of bride-bride. Luna’s moment of exclusion happens at his ninth birthday party, which he shares with his little girl friend, Alyson. His father questions Liam’s mother about why there are no boys at the party:
‘Doesn’t Liam have any of his own friends?’
‘He has lots of friends . They just happen to be girls.’
‘A boy his age. I found his birthday wish list. A Prom Barbie? A bra?’
‘He was kidding, Jack ... It was a joke’.
(Peters, 2004: p. 13, italics in original)
After his own and Alyson’s birthday presents have been unwrapped and none of Liam’s birthday wish list has materialized, he is distraught:
‘Come on. Where are they?’ ...
‘That’s not what I asked for. Where’s my bra?’...
Liam whirls at Mom. ‘You asked me what I wanted and I told you’.
(Peters, 2004: pp. 16–7)
His father then drags off Liam back to the house. Regan, from whose memory the scene is narrated, recalls:
I see Liam’s face turn red. Dad’s spine goes rigid ...
Whatever Dad said in the house that day had caused a rift in Liam’s universe.
(Peters, 2004: p. 17)
These are three distinct moments of ‘knowing’ in which the transgender subjects return the heteronormative gaze upon themselves and recognize themselves in difference.
One of the recurring narrative themes in these and other LGBT texts is the corrosive impact of this gaze upon the transgender subject, and the manner in which the exclusionary power relations in the intersubjective space operate to ‘authorize’ or ‘deauthorize’ not only the individual child subject’s power to act but also their power to be and to properly inhabit the identity conferred by their being so named (see Butler, 1993: pp. 226–7). There is an element of intention and more than a metafictional import here in my borrowing the words ‘authorize’ and ‘deauthorize’ from Butler, because the child characters in these and other LGBT texts are authored, and often by writers who themselves openly subscribe to LGBT identity.3 So, writing from within the discursive space, so to speak, offers these texts an important note of authenticity.
There is much to be said, too, about naming identity, not only as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and any other variation or permutation of the queer identity that must also (in this particular reading of the theory) include the so-called heteronormative naming of female and male. This is because the celebrated moment of subscribing to the subject position in the speech-act of naming oneself ‘gay’, ‘straight’, ‘trans’, and so on4 is not only an epiphany but also a moment of circumscription when the subject assumes, is subsumed in, and becomes an effect of the identity category that is already understood – historically and socially. Typically, in these texts, it is the moment when each protagonist makes such a declaration: when Luna names herself ‘I’m a Trans girl. A T-girl. The way you’re a genetic girl, a G-girl’ (Peters, 2004: p. 190); and when Ludovic announces his irrefutable belief that he will grow to be a girl and will marry Jérôme; and when Arjie meaningfully and openly admits to his brother, Diggy, his liking his school friend Shehan ‘very much’, following his first ever homo-erotic kiss (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 255). In the normative economy of identity categories, there is no return from this position, no half-measure identity between this and/or any other categories, because, as Butler points out, the identity is fixed in the name by ‘the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the usage that now emblematizes autonomy’ (Butler, 1993: p. 228). Hereafter, the democratized child subjects must negotiate their identity within the constraints of the identity category definition in which they are inscribed and within the intersubjective space that comprises a cast of others outside themselves who bring their already coded understandings to bear in a dialectic of ‘me’ and ‘not me’ suppositions. The trouble with such inscriptions of self as hermetically located in ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ identity categories to which Liam/Luna, Ludovic, and Arjie subscribe (who, after all, have only the already existing identity models to work within) is that they can be entirely and accurately described in old binary, pre-Butler terms and, furthermore, raise questions not only about the limitations imposed on the categories by the linguistic signifiers but also by how far the categories themselves can be identified as unitary and coherent within the signifiers. Such clearly marked girl and boy identities, articulated as oppositional, would seem misleadingly to suggest that a fully coherent, unified and univocal self is both possible and achievable, and further reinforces the binary paradigm. In fact, the individual manifestations and experiences of these transgender identities are much more complex, nuanced and different, between each child than it is possible to articulate within a simple boy/girl duality.
These questions return us once again to the queer discourse and to Sedgwick’s bid for ‘an open mesh of possibilities’, and they suggest that a more fluid, more versatile field of concepts and indices be mapped on to the paradigm to articulate not only the spectrum of sexual identity differences but also the multiple identity planes and their correspondences across various axes.
The intersubjective relations that emerge in these and so many other LGBT narratives can only be described as rampantly homophobic.5 Sedgwick has identified our society as ‘brutally homophobic’ in a way that is not ‘arbitrary or gratuitous, but tightly knit into the texture of family, gender, age, class and race relations’ (Sedgwick, 1992: pp. 3–4). The agents of homophobia in the three texts already discussed are the parents – especially the fathers – and other adults who, with only a few notable exceptions, exercise unfettered power to criticize, undermine, and marginalize their transgender children. Interestingly, in the context of Oedipal supremacy, the fathers who are in every case most vocal and censoriously opposed to their boy children’s behaviour are also unwittingly most instrumental in confirming their child’s identity predilection for the children themselves.6 Arjie’s father, for example, packs him off to an all-boys boarding school, ‘The Academy will force you to become a man’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 210); Ludovic’s father, backed up by his mother, presses for Ludovic to attend psychotherapy sessions with a view to correcting his behaviour.
At this point I want to bring in Joe Babcock’s The Boys and the Bees (2006), a text that focuses on the homosexual identity of its boy protagonist, sixth grader Andy Bobsees, and narrates, among other things, the homophobic behaviour of his peer group community in a Catholic coeducational day school. This text is exceptional in articulating the social psychology of difference in the minutiae of homophobic violence rampaging across the everyday lives of its homosexual children: the petty cruelties of peer group and parents, the exploitations, jealousies, deceptions, duplicities, ostracism, and acts of victimization. As an 11-year-old closet homosexual, Andy wants desperately to be seen and accepted as ‘one of the guys’, in which process he becomes wilfully complicit in the homophobic tyrannies of the ‘guys’ against their fall guy, James. James is regarded as a loser and a wimp; the paradigmatic ‘sissy boy’ who cries a great deal and whose every gesture and lisped utterance provoke a homophobic response. James is also Andy’s longest-standing best friend and the shared source of homoerotic ‘games’ played since early childhood, hotly pursued under cover (and under the bed covers) during their sleepovers. When the homophobic gaze begins to focus on James, Andy senses that he too is implicated by association. He rejects and publicly disowns James, telling him, ‘We seriously can’t be friends anymore ... You’re too much of a girl’ (Babcock, 2006: p. 62), while continuing to privately desire and invite James to sleepover with him. Thus begins a deeply psychological drama of desire and repulsion as each boy attempts to negotiate his homosexual identity across this homophobic minefield and which is focused on the body and emotions of James. Andy records: ‘I hated James. He was such a sissy’ (Babcock, 2006: p. 19). The polarization of Andy’s feelings of love and hate, attachment and rejection projected onto James, and his unwillingness to publicly associate with the hapless and (to him, now) transparently homosexual James is not only the sign of Andy’s denial of his own homosexuality but is also a characteristically primitive archetype of psychic splitting and a powerfully unconscious source of protection. Andy and James are also effectively two sides of the Oedipal triangle as Andy repudiates his primary and homoerotic attachment with the feminine (his mother) in James and makes his bid for identification with the Oedipal father who emerges in the shape of Mark Saddler. Mark is the archetypal masculine boy hero: a natural leader, natural sportsman, blonde, and good looking (Andy describes him as ‘the most beautiful boy ever’ [Babcock, 2006: p. 12]). He is adored by the girls and respected by the boys, is boyfriend of the most popular and attractive girl of the class, Anna, and is basketball supremo and captain of the team. Andy sets his sights on Mark and effectively courts him in his bid for acceptance into the community of boys who nevertheless continue to exclude him from their social circles and regard him as a ‘faggot’, like James. Here, as in Funny Boy, ‘faggot’ is the favourite and most often used term of homophobic abuse, even though these two stories are set thirty years apart:
‘I’m not a faggot.’
‘Yes you are,’ Brett said.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes you are. I can tell.’
I was staring Brett in the eyes, trying not to back down, wondering frantically how he could tell. What did he see? Did everyone see it? Did I look like a faggot right now?
(Babcock, 2006: p. 22)
The site of the Oedipal struggle is the male-coded narrative space of the local football field known (interestingly enough in this context) as ‘the triangle’, and it is the place at which all the boys, attended by the girls, congregate after school. Andy is hopeless at sport but – with James watching from the sidelines – he joins the basketball team to be close to Mark, who begins to give him private coaching to improve his game. Mark is the veritable Adonis of the boys’ world: tough, fair, and lithe of body. Andy’s transition, endorsement by, and bid for inclusion in the world of Mark could be his passport into the patriarchal (Symbolic) order and his confirmation in the codes of masculinity that mark him out as ‘normal’. But Mark, like Andy, is playing a double game of identity. He too is eventually exposed as ‘a faggot’ through his growing association with Andy, and he is relegated both by the guys and his former girlfriend, Anna, to the margins, suffering homophobic abuse along with Andy and James. Neither Andy nor Mark has openly admitted to being gay, either to themselves or to each other, and so their conversations around the topic are coded in innuendo and inference. Mark’s father reacts to the suggestion that his son may have been identified as gay by promptly removing him (with echoes of the fate of Selvadurai’s Arjie) from the coeducational ‘St Marks’ to ‘Trinity’, a strictly regulated all-boys Catholic day school that Mark describes as ‘The dumbest move given the circumstances’ (Babcock, 2006: p.126). In a final twist, Andy discovers Mark in bed with James:
I pushed the door open slowly and there they were. Mark and James, in James’s bed dressed only in underwear. All I could see was Marks’s white briefs as he straddled James ... I knew what I had seen, because I had played that game with James dozens of times. I wanted to kill James. (Babcock, 2006: p. 134)
The narrative focus thus moves away from Andy and on to James, investing the formerly passive, wimpish James with agency and self-determination and as legitimate and visible within his homosexual identity. What follows is an even more remarkable turn of events that is also the moment Andy both reconciles and recognizes his identity within the homosexual community: instead of turning away from Mark and James, as was his first and instinctive reaction, he goes back to embrace them:
Mark and James were like me, and something about seeing them together on the front porch made me feel left out. So I decided to join them ...
‘Are you two, like, boyfriends together?’
‘We’re just friends,’ Mark said. ‘Like me and you. Like you and James’.
(Babcock, 2006: p. 135)
A number of points arise from these events that mark a paradigm shift and something of a watershed in LGBT children’s literature by returning the narrative to the queer discourse. By blurring the sexual identity categories of Mark, the narrative exposes the instability of dominant identity fantasies that pathologize difference by exposing the fact that difference – as articulated through heterosexual norms – is a fluid and shifting ground. Andy’s pursuit of Mark effectively usurps the phallic paradigm of Oedipal desire when Mark is shown to be ambivalently situated in relation to the male and female aspects of the primary matrix. Ultimately, however, the queer discourse is materialized in the triumphant triangular relationship that emerges between Andy, James, and Mark because it serves to break down the heteronormative paradigm of relationships as romantically situated in the male and female dyad which serves only to sustain the myth of dualism. Here, instead, the vision is plural in a newly articulated sexual economy of equivalence-in-difference.
In every case, it is the question of relations within the intersubjective space that is at issue in these narratives and the possibilities they raise for greater resistance to normalization and harmonization within the paradigm of queer discourse. Sadly, however, the endings of Luna, Funny Boy, and Ma vie en rose are not as optimistic or paradigmatically progressive as the concluding scenes of The Boys and the Bees and bring neither closure nor resolution. Neither do they bring any real sense of reconciliation with, nor recognition of, these transgender subjects in terms of Benjamin’s third area. The narrative endings are, rather, a perpetuation of the status quo that sadly rings true. As a young adult, Luna – who remains unacknowledged as Luna by all but his sister, who has acted throughout as confidant – is unable to exist in Liam’s body. He eventually finds it necessary to leave home for a new life of anonymity in a different State, and what we are left to assume is that it will involve surgical reassignment. Arjie is sent off to a life of misery and victimization in an English, all-boys boarding school and assumes an uneasy homosexual identity. There is an unanswered question about how far the familial denial of Arjie’s childhood penchant for being with the girls, self adornment and wearing of saris, has been instrumental in an enforced disavowal of transgender identity and, equally, – if also ironically – how far it has driven him in later life to take up relationships with the ‘opposite’ sex. Butler might say of this particular inscription of subjectivity that Arjie’s homosexuality could only be understood on the basis that ‘heterosexual desire is presumed’ and that ‘opposites attract’. Butler also makes the point that ‘There are various ways of crossing that cannot be understood as stable achievements. ... It is difficult to say whether the sexuality of the transgendered person is homosexual or heterosexual’ (Butler, 2004: pp. 79, 142). In Ma vie en rose (1997), Ludovic’s family is presented as being reconciled to his transgender identity and the film ends with a family ‘love-in’ carrying the unspoken message that ‘We love you even though you’re transgender’. The scene of their reconciliation is the fancy dress birthday party of Ludovic’s new-found friend ‘Chris’ (Christine), at which the classical hero turns heroine, and, conversely, when Ludovic and Christine swap clothes: his cavalier suit for her princess dress. Both sets of parents are seen to acquiesce in an unwritten rule of equivalence and fairness by which Ludovic’s determination to wear dresses gives way to the more naturalized, more tolerated, and less pathologized paradigm of the ‘Tomboy’ and an implied assumption that Ludovic will either grow, or be trained, out of ‘it’ (see Halberstam, 2004). This scene of reconciliation does not provide the counter-hegemonic moment that producers may have hoped or viewers may have anticipated; instead it returns viewers to the carnivalesque context of the party in which Ludovic first launched his transgender identity, and ultimately resituates the transgender identity of the young child in ambiguity and ambivalence as a safer and more comfortable haven.
Benjamin, J. 1995. Like subjects, love objects: essays on recognition and sexual difference. Yale University Press, New Haven. Benjamin introduces the notion of ‘gender heterodoxy’ to examine the nature of gender and intersubjectivity.
De Lauretis, T. 2000. Alice doesn’t: feminism, semiotics, cinema. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. This collection of essays focuses on sexual difference. De Lauretis brings a feminist perspective and psychoanalytic and semiotic approach to the study of cinema.
Halberstam, J. 2005. In queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York University Press, New York. Halberstam proposes a queer time that is an alternative to herteronormative time or one that is based around marriage and child rearing.
Stacey, J. 1994. Star gazing: Hollywood cinema and female spectatorship. Routledge, London. See Chapter 2: From ‘Male gaze to female spectator’.
1Butler (1993) comments on the ‘reterritorialization’ of the term ‘queer’ as a former term of homophobic abuse: ‘For an occupation or reterritorialization of a term that has been used to abject a population can become the site of resistance, the possibility of an enabling social and political resignification. And this has happened to a certain extent with the notion of “queer”’, p. 231. See also, T. de Lauretis (1991) ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’; E.K. Sedgwick Epistemology of the closet. Katherine Gantz (2000) comments on the changing use of the term within academia: ‘As the political construction of “queer” became increasingly disciplinized in academia, the emerging body of “queer theory” lost its specifically homosexual connotation and was replaced by a diffuse set of diverse sexual identities. Like the path of feminism, the concept of queerness had been largely stripped of its political roots and transformed into a methodological approach accessible to manipulation by the world of predominantly heterosexual, white, middle-class intellectuals. It is possible that this chapter falls into this kind of reading of “queer”’, pp. 164–90; p. 165.
2See L. Mulvey (1975) for her analysis of how multiple modes of ‘looking’ in narrative cinema are created through the ‘male gaze’ as voyeur and fetish.
3Julie Anne Peters, for example, identifies her orientation as ‘Lesbian’ on her ‘My Space’ Biography. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny boy is an acknowledged fictional autobiography.
4The words themselves evoke and connote the supremacy of heteronormativity in Western discourse. See, for example, S. Seidman (2004). ‘Gay identity constructions reinforce the dominant hetero/homo sexual code with its heteronormativity’. If homosexuality and heterosexuality are a coupling in which each presupposes the other, each being present in the invocation of the other, and in which this coupling assumes hierarchical forms, then the epistemic and political project of identifying a gay subject reinforces and reproduces this hierarchical figure. pp. 105–41; p. 131.
5There is a tendency in LGBT children’s literature narratives to concentrate on LGBT identities as problematic. However, there are a number of exceptions in which the LGBT identity is fully integrated within the characters and the social context. For example, David Levithan’s Boy meets boy (2003) is the story of unrequited same sex desire of high school sophomore student Paul for Noah in the pattern of any young adult romance novel, and for which the backdrop and social milieu is a web of complex relations across a fully integrated, fully realized, fully acknowledged, fully tolerant community of queer identities – from drag-queens to transexuals and straights – that is undoubtedly utopian in its vision but in the power politics that privileges the discourses of homophobia, there is interestingly no name. Doug MacLeod Tumble turn (2003) is a gently articulated novel in the mode of ‘Adrian Mole’, told through a series of email exchanges between 11-year-old Dom and his uncle Peri. Through these exchanges Dom conjectures the possibility that he may be gay and reveals that his family is in turmoil; his father’s infidelity, and the impending breakup of his parents’ marriage laced with their homophobic conversations. Dom’s parents are the greatest source of denial of Dom’s potential homosexuality and so they take him for therapy, while his uncle Peri (a Buddhist, like Dom) is quietly supportive. It is Dom’s matter-of-fact tone that marks out this novel as exceptional in this context of LGBT children’s literature.
6I am using ‘Oedipal supremacy’ in the Freudian/Lacanian understanding that inscribes the child’s developmental severing of its primary identification with the Mother and pull towards the dominant order of the Father in patriarchal discourse.