Bloom's Normal (2002) and Tarttelin's Golden Boy (2013): Teaching Gender Fluidity Written across Time and Text

Introduction

Sex. Sex. Sex. I want to repeat this word three times because the letters s, e, and x, when combined to form the word "sex," assume magnetic properties. Textually inscribed into course titles, the word "sex" grabs student interest and lures them in droves into women and gender studies classes.

I am faculty in women and gender studies (WGST) at a comprehensive public university in western New York. I am a cisidentified¹ female and gender nonconforming.² One of the courses that I regularly teach, titled Sex and Culture, takes up the question of sex and gender identities as understood across geographies of person and place. The course serves the WGST major and minor in addition to several liberal arts student learning outcomes situated under the college General Education rubric. Even though the college boasts a growing WGST major and minor, the majority of the students enroll for General Education credit and are often new to and skeptical of WGST knowledge.³ When considering text adoption for this diversely enrolled course, I tend to examine material across genres of fiction and nonfiction from the humanities and social science disciplines. Questions I repeatedly ask myself include: What writings are new, diversely authored, and progressive to knowledge growth in the WGST field? What texts will be most engaging to students both new to and familiar with WGST? And what materials might students stick with versus abandon because of elevated theoretical discourse? This last question does not suggest that I want to water down or run away from deeper theoretical content, but indicates that a narrative approach to instruction can bring students into the theoretical depth that undergirds WGST knowledge.

Like the word "sex," narrative inscriptions on identity can pull students into the fold of the many theoretical complexities inherent to studying sex and gender identity. Susan Stryker, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant, detailed below, write on areas of feminist thought that form the theoretical lens that I use when teaching sex and gender identity. These scholars offer complex concepts that, if reading in isolation or alongside other social science texts, can alienate learners. As a means to access the scholarly base of WGST knowledge and make these and theorists like them more tangible for a diverse range of Sex and Culture students, I began using creative, nontheoretical works like Amy Bloom's 2002 nonfiction book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-dressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and several years later, Abigail Tarttelin's 2013 Golden Boy: A Novel. Golden Boy, a compelling story about an intersex⁴ boy, invites students into a complex narrative on sex and gender diversity, which makes the novel my Sex and Culture teaching go-to. Conversely, I no longer teach Normal. Once hooked by Bloom's journalistic style and distinction as an accomplished fiction writer, I now find that Normal pushes students to an outsider space where they gaze in on contrived gender anomalies. My arrival at this pedagogical fork owes itself to shifts in WGST knowledge about sex and gender identity, in particular, discussion of intersectionality.⁵ In what follows, I summarize theories of identity and voice as backdrop for inquiry, transitioning to a systematic discussion of teaching about sex and gender identity to differently positioned learners, drawing examples from reading materials that I use in instruction. I conclude with implications for WGST teaching praxis.

Theory and Voice

Theory informs teaching. Who we are and how we come into to what we know and teach are critical to our pedagogical choices. One of my teaching strategies in studying sex and gender identity in the classroom is to introduce students to voices of those living gender-variant lives while coming into this knowledge somewhat outside of this space of identity. Similarly, the reading selections that I use as teaching examples in this essay, Bloom's Normal and Tarttelin's Golden Boy, are authored by white cisfemale writers. Although I analyze Bloom's and Tarttelin's texts using trans and queer theoretical frameworks such as those penned by Stryker, Butler, and Berlant, my...