Girl, Please! (A return to chick & dick lit)

Day 32 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Tom, who was reading Misfortune, the Wesley Stace book about a boy raised as a girl in the 19th century, tried to comment on this blog earlier, sent his thoughts to me another way, and I saved his comments on chick lit and dick lit for later.

Later is now:

"Hmmm, here's one gay male perspective. I would have thought Chick Lit would have fallen in the same general category as Chick Flicks, which by my definition are not necessarily by or even about women, but of a certain genre deemed too 'feminine' to appeal to men. My partner and I are always at odds when it comes to films because he tends to like gore and slasher/suspense films (guy flicks), while I am more drawn to more serious, 'thoughty' films, along with romantic comedies and romance in general (chick flicks).

"It tends to be the same with books, he likes true crime and I like books, mostly by women authors (including mysteries by women authors with female detectives), that have a more thoughtful bent to them and are more language oriented. I'd have referred to my taste as more chick lit oriented, but that wouldn't fall under your definition. I hadn't thought of either chick lit or chick flicks as having been necessarily lighter or funnier, but literature that would by a stereotypically male definition, would appeal more to women.

"By the same token, I'd refer to Hemingway and even Stephen King as dick lit because both authors are so prodigiously 'male' in their attitudes that I don't connect to them at all. Which is not to say I'm not male or relate to male authors or subjects, just that I don't relate in any way to that kind of machismo.

"And where do strongly gay male visions like Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris fall? Chick or dick? Or somewhere in between. This has been a very enlightening discussion. Thanks for sharing. "

I've got to say that Burroughs and Sedaris are very popular on the Selected New Arrivals shelf by the door at Babbitt's, and all the recent buyers have been women!

Rupaul offers a way to look at being human in this Woman Made Gallery Call for Art:

"We are all born naked, the rest is just drag."

Woman Made, as its name will tell you, is a gallery dedicated to exhibiting and promoting work by women artists to help correct a historical imbalance in their representation in the world, but for some theme-based group shows it calls for art from men as well. This is an all gender call, and defines gender this way:

"Gender is a performance, an act that is perpetuated and maintained by societal norms and expectations, but how, and to what extent does it define us? 'Girl, Please!' seeks to push and transcend the definition of gender while also exploring its relation to individual character amongst collective expectations. Bearing in mind Rupaul's statement, drag in this case is not disco, but rather an illustration of feminity and masculinity in shades of grey."

If you are an artist interested in this theme and in submitting work to this show, click the Woman Made link above to learn more about how.

If you want to return to the chick lit/dick lit dicussion or pursue these other ideas on what we mean by "gender," feel free to comment.

Interesting that Tom mentions Hemingway, one of those boys dressed as a girl for a time in childhood, which was fairly common practice, I understand, as one of those 'male' writers.

Gender Studies & Faking It

Day 15 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. (Don't forget to comment on the "why" part, here and in any previous entry!!)

Tom is reading Misfortune, by Wesley Stace, about a boy raised as a girl in the 19th century. A man finds a baby in a trash heap (where, alas, we know babies to be left even today) and brings it home. I say "it" because the baby boy is presented to the world as a baby girl...for as long as that deception can hold.

Turns out the novelist Wesley Stace is actually the musician John Wesley Harding, which is not so much a deception as a pseudonym, something writers are known sometimes to choose. At the above link to an Amazon page, you can listen to 3 of the songs he connects to the book, which winds music into the plot.

Deception and gender-bending identity are, however, crucial to the book Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy by Savannah Knoop. Knoop, a woman, pretended to be JT LeRoy, a transgendered man, enjoying six years of glamor and celebrity as a hip novelist before being exposed. The novels attributed to LeRoy were really written by Laura Albert, Knoop's sister-in-law, and it's not hard to imagine why two people looking for a way to survive as writers in our celebrity-driven fast-food culture might come up with a scam like this one. Sigh... And, indeed, "faking it" doesn't seem to have hurt Knoop too much. She has her own author page at Amazon, where we learn she is now designing clothes in San Francisco.

I learned about JT and company in the current issue of The Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation, where the Knoop book is reviewed by Krista Eastman, so I know what she's been reading! In the same article she reviewed Fakers, Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders by Paul Maliszewski, and her review mentions Stephen Glass, who fabricated articles for The New Republic and about whom a movie was made, Shattered Glass, a great title, featuring Hayden Christensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, Steve Zahn, Melanie Lynskey, and Hank Azaria.

I actually own this film, and several others about writers, acquired for teaching a course on writers and their lives, and another on famous plagiarism/fabrication cases. I mentioned this plagiarism course in an earlier blog entry about Rick Bragg, whom commenter NobleSavage called "a known fake." I think it is indeed well known that Bragg left the New York Times because he did what he did, which was use the eye-witness reporting of a stringer as if it were his own eye-witnessing, without crediting the stringer. In reading further about that case, I discovered, however icky this is, that it was common practice then at the NYT not to credit interns and stringers for their contributions, and that Bragg wasn't the only one who did this. He was the one who did this and got called on it, so he resigned. After the Jayson Blair scandal, which did involve "faking it," or fabricating his supposed journalism, the New York Times changed its practices. But by then Blair had brought down his higher-ups, and Bragg had brought himself down.

To learn more about the Bragg scandal, check out this article by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, one of the early reports, and, of course, Wikipedia!

Or, to have more fun than that, read Misfortune or Girl Boy Girl, or another book about "faking it."

But back to gender studies! Like Garrison Keillor in today's Writer's Almanac, I say Happy Birthday to Judith Butler, who writes about gender and identity and, sometimes, the inherent comedy of sexual positions!