This is why writing workshops are entertaining.

I'm taking two different fiction courses this semester--a forms class, and a workshop class. The piece I submitted for the former earlier this week was a first-preson narrative in which the identity of the speaker was never clearly marked.  My intent in writing this was to obfuscate the gender of the speaker.  Call it an experiment.  The story was about my speaker's very sexually geared relationship with a young man named Dylan.  Part of my intent was to see whether the class interpreted the speaker as male or female.

Of course, it doesn't matter either way, because my speaker was Taylor, who is both intersexed and gender-neutral.

(That was fun to explain, because the guy sitting next to me was asking "yeah, but how often does that happen?  Like one in a billion?"  Not that I have much respect for this guy anyway.  I was happy to hear the girl on the other side of him comment that it happens "more often than you may think".)

Most of the class interpreted my speaker as female.  Now, part of this could be due to the writer=narrator fallacy, which in a class of this level, I'd expect.  But I tend to think it was more a matter of that interpretation being heteronormative.  Two people, the professor included, read my speaker as male, which is closer to reality, since Taylor mostly presents as male.  One read the character as male because of the Fight Club references to "I am Jack's..." which makes sense, since people do tend to refer to the Fight Club narrator as Jack because of these lines.  The professor read the character as male because he didn't think a girl would refer to what the two characters were doing as 'fucking'.  Which I tend to think of as more of a male phrasing, myself.  But it was interesting.

Now, I really can't say why they read it one way or the other, but I just thought it was interesting that they did.  And the questions I am left with are these: is it because the other character is male?  Is it because the narrator is a submissive?  Is it because they know the writer as a female?

Just some random thoughts.  Things I probably won't find out the answers to, and I'm probably reading too much into things.

I was just incredibly thrilled that the first thing in my workshop that happened was a rather lengthy argument over whether the narrator was male or female.  I'm enjoying breaking down the idea of the binary being so clean-cut and real.  I intend to keep playing genderfuckery out in my stories this semester, just for my own entertainment.