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  • Boy-Girl, Imp, Priest:Pauli Murray and the Limits of Identity
  • Doreen M. Drury (bio)

As Pauli Murray's life, writings, and activism have entered public awareness, a range of perceptions—a field of dreams, we could say—has developed regarding who she was and what meaning she holds for us today: from a divinity school professor's assertion of Murray as a "mainstream" black religious woman to a librarian's sense of her as "butch lesbian"; from Murray as a great feminist and important "first (black) woman" to Murray as "transgender"; from exemplary North Carolinian and heroic "one-woman civil rights movement," as one scholar has called Murray, to an anonymous victim of medical science, as some of her archival records were presented in a lesbian and gay public history exhibit. The list goes on.

Over time, I have become curious and concerned about these condensed representations of Murray, summary statements based on selected parts of her story. The problem is that when we put historical figures like Murray to work for us as narrowly representative, we inevitably drop out aspects of her life that are complicating and often inconvenient. The decisions that she made or didn't make; the paths she pursued and her recalibrations; her deep pleasures as well as the intensity of her regrets, fears, and anxieties; her physical aches and pains; her personal and political ambivalences. Specifically, for example, celebrations of Murray as a hero tend to emphasize public achievements at the expense of motivating aspects of her private life, and to deny the compounding costs and traumatic effects of history on Murray as a person. Claiming Murray as representative of gender and sexual identity categories, such as transgender or lesbian, too often obscures the role of family history as well as racism, sexism, and economic injustice in shaping aspirations and desires. In my own exploration of [End Page 142] Murray's life, I am particularly interested in the complex reasons for her positioning of herself as "normal" in gender and sexual terms and how she fended off any association of her gender trouble and sexual desire with the abnormal, the degraded, the stigmatized.

From childhood, Murray seems to have been acutely aware of life lived in the intersections, where gender shapes race shapes class shapes sexuality in dynamic relation, and where individuals are embedded within families and communities that mediate history to their members. Roderick A. Ferguson theorizes intersections as necessarily disrupting identity claims and I think that Murray would have appreciated his point. "Intersections," he writes, "are necessarily messy, chaotic, and heterodox. Why necessarily so? Because intersections are not about identity."1 After struggling to have a place on the "normal" side, Murray came to live and think in many ways against identities, as if she knew that dignity, security, recognition, and inclusion cannot necessarily be grasped once and for all from any particular identity position, but have to be cultivated in an ongoing way within intersections. She also seems to have understood the tremendous capacity of marginalizing forces to adapt, reconfigure, and continue their work.

"Experimentation on the Male Side"2

Familiarity with some of Murray's private papers has led some scholars to name her lesbian or transgender. Not only did Murray not call herself by such terms, but these attributions have also ignored the specific race, class, and sex/ gender contexts that shaped Murray's approach to her gender and sexuality. For a time in the 1930s and 1940s, influenced by medical research on glands and hormones, Pauli Murray pursued the idea that there might be a biological source, a "hidden" male gland that would explain her falling in love with women.3 Heartbroken when love relationships with women failed or were impossible, Murray suffered emotional and physical breakdowns, and when hospitalized on several occasions, raised these issues with her physicians. This inner [End Page 143] maleness, she thought, might also explain her aspiration to what she called "the highest professions"—law, theology, and medicine—rather than women's professions like teaching or nursing. Key here is that Murray developed the idea of a biological maleness that produced outward signs of masculinity as a way to distance herself from categorization...

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