Een visionaire allegorie op de transformaviteit van gender? Sarah Schulmans 'The penis story' (1979)
Auteurs
Bart Eeckhout
Samenvatting
This contribution looks at a fictional text
consciously set up to bewilder readers and
challenge their views. The penis story is the
only short story so far by the politically activist,
New York-based lesbian writer Sarah
Schulman. Composed at the very outset of
her career, it tells of a lesbian character that,
under the influence of a frustratingly reined-in
relationship with a woman who is waiting for
a man to rescue her, wakes up one morning
only to find herself with a penis. We follow the
character’s experiences, which are both funny
and informed by a strong sense of gender and
sexuality, until she becomes dissatisfied with
her physical appendix and decides to have
her female genitals reconstructed. The essay
analyses this story through the lenses of a
chapter entitled Undiagnosing gender from the
queertheorist Judith Butler’s recent collection
Undoing gender (2004). Such a juxtaposition
proves able to elucidate how especially gender
and sexuality operate as performative
and transformative realities in the story, and
to help a better understanding of the heteronomy
paradoxically always informing the
concept of autonomy that is at the heart of
transgender studies.