Genre and Identity

Both of the genre studies articles (Graham and Pennell) gave me a lot to think about. I definitely want to read some of the articles they cite, such as Miller, Bazerman, and Giddens. Genres certainly do have rhetorical power. Take for instance any form you have to fill out that identifies your gender. It produces social knowledge about how many genders there are and what categories they are. Also, the question are you married, single, divorced, widowed, etc. does much to produce and reify a heteronormative social knowledge of intimacy because it elides relationships that homosexuals form, such as life partners, because they have no legal consequences. The Houle et al. piece gives some insight into the implications that genres-as-knowledge production can influence identity. Bazerman locates a sense of agency in genres in that individuals can use them for their own purposes.

This seems to be Alex’s purpose in his project—to re-imagine his identity through multiple genres. Although as an audience I did feel a little put off with the “You decide,” it did locate me just where I am—in a position of power relative to trans-folk who despite being tagged onto the alphabet soup of the LGBT movement (the full version is LGBT2-SIQQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, intersex, queer, and questioning) have historically been erased from it. Also, at times I felt like I was listening to a rebellious, petulant teenager who just needed to grow up (See Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place for a full discussion of maturity and queers, esp. trans). LOL I laugh at myself because I can recognize the privilege that under-rides those reactions. At the same time, different rhetorical appeals may be more persuasive to a privileged audience than the ones he uses.

The genre of myth and the genre of sound really drove Alex’s purpose home to me. By reworking the Robin Hood myth, or showing it as multiple (“That’s why it’s such a complex and beautiful legend because it changes with every single person who reads it.”), Alex produces himself as multiple, able to be re-read. The “You decide” takes on a different meaning here—one that I certainly can identify with. Whenever I “come out” to someone, there is a re-viewing process that happens. Sometimes the person verbalizes it—“Oh yeah, now it makes sense. You get real quiet when we talk about sports.” (because, you know, talking about sports is a sign of heterosexual males despite the fact that there are many straight guys who don’t watch sports and many gay men who do—gay men even have sports bars! Gasp! I was actually shocked the first time I heard that.). Or they non-verbally re-view me by paying attention to certain behaviors or looking me up and down. I certainly don’t think of myself as an outlaw (I am an upstanding citizen, thank you very much), as Alex has described himself, but in many ways according to the “laws” of society I am just by being myself. So, the re-reading that Alex describes about himself through the Robin Hood myth helps us to understand about how he views his gender as continuously and simultaneously both male and female: “Was I Alex then--Alex when I was a girl called Bethany? Does that mean that Bethany is gone/dead now? No. I am Bethany now, just as I was Alex then, too.” Some transgendered individuals assert that they have no gender, or are a gender not defined by male and female categories. For Alex, gender, instead of being on a continuum (the more masculine you are the less feminine you are), seems to exist as two separate poles (allowing for the possibility to be high in male and high in female characteristics). Does this, then, resolve into androgyny?

In addition to myth, the genre of audio technology seemed useful to Alex’s project of producing knowledge about his identity through multiple genres. As a person prepares for and undergoes sex-reassignment surgery, she or he takes hormones, which affect, among other things, the depth of the voice. Since Alex selected different clips from different points in this process, the listener is able to hear the change in his voice. This embodied rhetorical move could not happen in simply print text with the same degree of efficacy.

Although I am skeptical about how liberatory this project may be (Who will access this??), the myth and the audio genres do the work of producing social knowledge particularly about the multiplicity of identity for Alex.