Session V: Gender and Sexual Trespasses

Lexey Bartlett (Fort Hays State University, Hays KS): "Queered Reflections: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable"

The novel L’Enfant de Sable (The Sand Child) (1985) by Tahar Ben Jelloun challenges the characterization of femaleness and homosexuality as disabilities in 1940s Morocco through the relationship between two cultural misfits. Ahmed apparently fits into his culture, but he is actually a woman whose father has raised her as a man. Ahmed acquiesces so fully that she decides to get married, horrifying her father, who had obviously not thought the deception through to its end. For her wife, she chooses Fatima, a cousin with epilepsy and other unnamed infirmities that make her an undesirable wife for most men. The joining of these two misfits ultimately challenges Ahmed’s own ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as transgressing Islamic ideas of sexuality. Ahmed thinks of being female as a “wound,” as a disability, but Fatima’s strength and determination challenge Ahmed’s male cultural assumptions about being female.

Some scenes also intimate that Fatima’s unnamed affliction may be homosexuality; this connection between homosexuality and disability indicates their culture’s view of homosexuality, especially lesbianism. Fatima serves as a queered reflection of Ahmed, as this relationship highlights for Ahmed his own sexual “disability”—the fact of his female body. Since neither Ahmed nor Fatima fit the normal categories of gender and sexuality in their culture, their relationship encourages Ahmed eventually to “come out”—that is, to reveal herself publicly—as a woman, after a literally carnivalesque journey. That Fatima occupies an “other” category of sexuality, as disabled and possibly homosexual, makes her a reflection, but an altered one, through which Ahmed can consider his (her) own gender categorization, and it makes the novel a challenge to cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality.

Pen Pearson (Northern State University, Aberdeen SD): "Territorial Marking through the Topos of Other in the Live and Poems of Charlotte Mew"

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), an early-Modernist poet, won the praises of compatriots Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, yet Mew never achieved widespread acclaim, and, only infrequently anthologized to this day, entertains a literary reputation as a minor poet on the farthest margins of the canon. As a spinster, she lived in genteel poverty, caretaking, along with her sister Anne, her invalid mother. Because a number of their siblings were institutionalized with schizophrenia, Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry nor have children. During Mew's life, the family moved from the modest accommodations indicative of their class to those of near impoverishment. In fact, Mew's marginal status in the canon mirrors her marginal status of gentility, as well as her status of "other" as woman, lesbian, and genetic heir to mental illness. Her poem's treatment of liminal space, the physiological and psychological thresholds of private and public, maps and marks the topos of other. In doing so, Mew trespasses on and lays claim to a hinterland on the outer rim of the privileged realms of class, gender, sexuality, and mental sanity in Edwardian society.


Dale Sullivan ( North Dakota State University, Fargo ND): "The Mystery of Godliness: Margaret Attwood’s Father/God Images in The Blind Assassin"

Reading Margaret Attwood’s The Blind Assassin is like reading a mystery: the reader is confined to a strict sequential telling of what appears to be a memoir written by an elderly woman, but the book is a complex genre, containing several smaller genres, such as newspaper stories and obituaries.

Most notably, The Blind Assassin is composed of three narratives: a fantasy, which is embedded in a romance, which is embedded in a memoir. Early on, the reader begins to realize that each narrative replicates themes of its companion narratives, and each of these themes can be read across the three narratives once the characters and episodes in each narrative are interpreted in terms of the companion narratives. The reader is led to speculate about the interrelationships among the narratives, and like a reader of mystery, continually hazards hypotheses about who did what, even speculating about possible culpabilities.

One of these themes is the Father/God theme. It is not that each narrative has a Father who is symbolic of God, but there is in each a godlike, father-like character in relation with women characters in each narrative. The variations on this theme enrich Attwood’s comment on patriarchy and guilt.