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The slave system and the racial bigotry in Uncle Tom's Cabin don't touch me, don't bother me at all. Didn't bother me in Gone With the Wind either. What is bothering me is this: I'm reading Trumpet by Jackie Kay which is about a jazz trumpet player who was female-bodied, lived as a man, had a wife and an (adopted) son, and who was only discovered to be female-bodied upon his death. And there's this one character, a character whom we're not supposed to sypathize with much or agree with, who keeps referring to him with female pronouns, calling him a woman. That bothers me.

In part, I think it's because I identify as genderqueer* and I don't want to be referred to with female pronouns myself** and because issues of gender and sexuality are of tremendous importance to me, personally and intellectually, and because being queer is a big part of my identity***. But a bigger part of it is form. Trumpet shifts from first-person to first-person, all introspective. There are breaks of form, but for different kinds of first-person. Kay stays the hell out of it. And Kay lets us come to our own conclusions. Lets us think that Colman is a jerk at first, maybe. Let's us wonder what the hell is going on for the first couple chapters. Doesn't tell us who the hero is - breaking out, injecting the authorial voice can be interesting, formally, and can provide emphasis, but it's damn hard to do that and not ... distract the reader.

Melville did it better, but Melville wasn't constrained (if I may make a judgment like that) by the conventions of the sentimental novel. Admittedly, I like the adventure genre much better than anything that might be called sentimental, and Melville's writing style is much more to my taste, and I like the games he plays ... If Melville did it better, it's because he was playing a kind of game that I'm interested in playing along with and playing myself. Although Melville and Beecher Stowe use similar tactics, similar forms, the function is different - Beecher Stowe isn't playing like Melville is. (And when I say play, I mean something between child-play and work; an experiment, a game in emergence, a 'let's see what happens'.)

What was I talking about? Right. So, it's the way Beecher Stowe shows us her characters, the way she introduces us to them. She won't shut up and let us get to know each other in our own ways and in our own times, she's frantic that her readers draw the conclusions she means for us to draw. Overt authorial intent is never a pretty thing. There's characters I'd like if they were handled differently - mainly Augustus, though I've got vague recollections of someone named Cassy ... Anyway, them I'd like to get to know better, away from Beecher Stowe's busybody interference.

I'm not interested in the use-value of crying. But utterly obsessed with the functions of humor.

*I don't identify as a woman or as a man. And I can't get much farther in defining myself - nothing I'm going to write here, anyway. But that's a whole other issue.

**I prefer zhe, which is a portmanteau of female pronouns and the gender neutral neologism 'ze'. This might change, esp since I like fucking with language. I think what I'm doing with my poetry is breaking language down so I can build it back up some other way.

***Queer mentally ill (Jewish) atheist intellectual and netizen and writer, to put it more fully. And omnivore.