Gender-Bending in Shes Come Undone :: Shes Come Undone Essays

Gender-Bending in Shes Come Undone Is Wally Lamb, author of Shes Come Undone, qualified to write a first-person narrator in a pistillate voice? After all, as a man, what does he know about womens issues? In this essay I will question the issue of gender-bending writers and discuss Mr. Lambs use of such tool. The term gender-bender usually refers to a pop singer or a follower of a pop cult ...who deliberately affects an androgynous appearance by wearing sexually ambiguous clothing, make-up, etc. (Ayto and Simpson 81) While authors are not included in this specific definition, we must not degenerate the possibility that writers can fall under the category of being a gender-bender. Applying some of the same fictitious characteristics of the definition, I believe that an author can be a gender-bender by changing the voice of the writer in the novels. Wally Lamb would fall under this category, because as a male author, he is writing his main character in a female voice. The concept of gender-bending authors is not completely foreign to literature, while it may not be applied to the definition presented above. For example, in investigator novels that are written by women, some of the characters take on different genders than their writers. In the following passage, taken from the essay Gender (De)Mystified Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction, by Timothy Shuker-Haines and Martha M. Umphrey, discussion is made of detective author Sue Graftons ability to write in the male persona. Kinsey Millhones a female character in the book F Is for Fugitive persona is gendered substantially as masculine. A woman who has few friends and lives for her work, she is self-consciously, almost parodically male-defined, as, for example, when she describes her tendency to amuse herself with the abridged calcium Penal code and textbooks on auto theft rather than engaging in the teatime gossip of a Miss Marple. (Delamater and Prigozy 73) Gender-bending also refers to sex interpolate operations. Such as the case with performance artist Kate Bornstein - a graduate of Brown University - who underwent such an operation thirteen years ago. In an article on the schools website, Ms. Bornstein discusses gender-bending and some of the issues she discusses can also apply to gender-bending in novels. The way I view gender is a way to express yourself. ...Gender is just a doorway, and so is sexuality, race and age.