A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson was adopted from Ethiopia to Sweden when he was two years old, along with his older sister. His mother had died of tuberculosis, and her children were incorrectly believed to be orphans. (I'm using the passive voice because Samuelsson never found out exactly how this came about, or if any of his living relatives would have been willing or able to take him in had they known what was going on or, for that matter, if any of them did know.)

Growing up, he wanted to be a professional soccer player but was too small (later, he discovered that he was a year younger than everyone thought), so he turned to cooking, eventually becoming a successful chef in New York. Due to his sister's detective work, as an adult he discovered that their father, whom he had thought was dead, was alive, and that he had something like a hundred relatives he'd never known about. His visits to Ethiopia inspired him to start cooking Ethiopian food. He won Top Chef Masters with an Ethiopian meal.

Great story. Samuelsson is an excellent writer, and his story is atmospheric, thoughtful, and honest. He's definitely of the "warts and all" school of memoir writing, which I appreciate. He's particularly good on his cross-cultural experiences, the complexity of his unusual racial and cultural status, and the connections between food, family, and culture.

Yes, Chef: A Memoir

A childhood/teenage memoir of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Myers’ family and neighborhood, his early attempts at writing, and the pervasive racism that slowly poisons his life and dreams.

Myers’ relaxed, warm style and deadpan humor make this easy reading, though I suspect that the episodic structure and lack of emphasis on the moments of conventional action would appeal more to adults than to teenagers.

View on Amazon: Bad Boy: A Memoir

A collection of essays, many autobiographical. If you’re interested in Amy Tan and writing, this is a must-read. If you dislike her fiction, I hesitate to recommend this; the style and most of the topics not focused on writing are quite similar. I do generally like her fiction and I am interested in writing, so I enjoyed this.

A number of the most powerful and poignant stories focus on her remarkably eventful and often traumatic life, the equally eventful and traumatic life of her mother, and their difficult relationship. (Difficult is putting it mildly: when Tan was a teenager, her mother, who was frequently suicidal, held a cleaver to Tan’s throat.) I hadn’t realized quite how autobiographical some of her fiction was until I read this book.

I also enjoyed most of the pieces on writing. Tan is quite funny about detailing the neurosis-beset life of the writer. In more serious matters, she has several essays about the expectations put on her as a Chinese-American writer (she dislikes the term “writer of color”), both from white people and from people of color. Her essays on the matter are heartfelt and worth reading even if you totally disagree with some or all of her opinions, which are too complex to summarize here.

The last essay, about a mysterious chronic illness she develops which causes a cascade of horrifying symptoms which eventually include hallucinations, is both a compelling medical detective story and a good conclusion to the book, though I was not fond of her attempt to pull in 9/11, which occurred at the same time. (Moral: if no one knows what’s wrong with you and you have bizarre symptoms, online research is the next best thing to Dr. House.)

Like most essay collections, there’s some randomness and a couple of pieces that could have been dropped with no harm to the book. But it’s a strong collection overall.

Jennifer Boylan was once Jim Boylan: novelist, teacher, and father of two sons. But from her earliest memories, she had always believed that she was female, but trapped in a male body. Finally she can't take it any more, comes out to her wife, male best friend, and everyone else, and decides to make her body match her identity.

As might be expected from a professional writer, this is a very well-written memoir, and not only has an inherently interesting subject, but an unusual focus, which is how Boylan's change affects the people who know her and their relationships. It's quite thought-provoking, though I would have liked to see it go farther in grappling with the issue of gender identity and how that interacts with social and personal conceptions of masculinity and femininity.

For instance, after Boylan begins taking estrogen and presenting herself as female but before having the operation, she becomes obsessed with dieting even though her weight is perfectly normal. She feels that this is the result of her picking up on societal pressures on women--but if she always identified as female, why did she never feel that before? And if the pressure is so great that even someone raised and living as a man immediately succumbs to it, why is it that some women raised in cultures less obsessed with weight are immune to the diet frenzy even after moving to the US? Did Boylan already believe that women are manipulated by social pressures, and so was predisposed to that manipulation?

I don't have an answer, but I would have liked to see more space devoted to those questions, and similar ones dealing with sexual orientation. A doctor tells Boylan that of his heterosexual male-to-female patients, after the operation one third stay attracted to women, making them lesbians, sort of. One third become attracted to men, making them heterosexual, sort of. And one third become asexual. I can't even begin to guess what this says about gender and sexual orientation-- fluid? fixed, but in different ways for different people? -- But I'd have liked to see the matter explored further.

I followed a link from a webpage on the book to a webpage on transsexuality, intersexuality, and gender identity, which suggests that gender identity is based on brain structure rather than genetics, genitalia, or upbringing. This explains everything from the sad case of John/Joan (a boy who was raised as a girl after losing his penis in a circumcision accident, but who believed that he was male despite all insistence to the contrary) to androgen insensitivity (people genetically XY who appear female and have female gender identities) and, of course, transsexuals.

However, I have a problem with the site's definition of male and female identities, as they seem entangled in stereotypical ideas of masculinity and femininity:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS.html

"It is amazing that psychiatrists completely missed all of this in the past, and so long assumed that gender identity was neutral at birth and later established by social interactions. Mis-gendered people themselves have long reported their problem not as one of THOUGHTS, but of cross-gendered percepts and BODY FEELINGS - as a little child the gendered feelings of how your body wants to move, how you respond to being touched, how aggressive or cuddly you are, how you interact with other little children. Then, after puberty, one's feelings upon being sexually aroused, and whether those deep urges are male (mounting urges) or female (urges of being manipulated and penetrated)."

This suggests that a woman who is aggressive and likes to be on top has a male gender identity. I beg to differ.

I have always strongly identified as female (as far as I know, I am physically and genetically female), so much so that as a girl, I was offended when I was called a tomboy. I felt that not only was I not a boy, I was not even boy-like. Rather, I felt that the feelings and activities which people said were masculine couldn't be, because I experienced them and I was a girl. I was a girl who liked to climb trees and kick balls and catch lizards, therefore none of those likings could be masculine.

To this day, I am dubious about the terms "masculine" and "feminine" when they are presented as anything other than common stereotypes, cultural trends, or bell-curves. But though I can't think of a single non-biological or physical tendency or trait that I sincerely believe is truly masculine or feminine, I am still rock-solid convinced that I am one hundred percent female. It's a puzzler.