{"id":936,"date":"2019-11-14T12:58:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T17:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/?page_id=936"},"modified":"2019-12-18T05:04:24","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T10:04:24","slug":"lindheim-marx","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/lindheim-marx\/","title":{"rendered":"I Tiresias"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Seemingly as old as time itself is the human fascination with the liminal form. Something about the aesthetics of someone \u201cin-between\u201d male and female seems to be unusually compelling to authors. In classical times, there was the Greek story of Hermaphroditus, a person with both male and female sex characteristics. In Renaissance art, painted angels seem to be androgynous too. In Edo Japan, male performers cast in female roles in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">kabuki<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> were sexualized to the point of being banned by the government. In the late 19th and early 20th century, books like <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Orlando<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> by Virginia Woolf and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Picture of Dorian Grey<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> by Oscar Wilde portrayed liminal figures and androgynous beauty ideals. This came to a head around the 1970s through 80s as pop music embraced androgyny with singers like Prince, Boy George, and David Bowie.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other hand, in \u201cthe transgender narrative,\u201d the ambiguous intermediary states were all but ignored. Paraphrasing from Sandy Stone\u2019s \u201cPosttranssexual Manifesto,\u201d early trans narratives almost universally describe a sudden change from an unambiguous man to an unambiguous woman with no territory in between. Moreover, they tend to describe a unique and recognizable moment when that sudden transformation occurs. Stone argues that this performance is done in order to meet the standard for \u201ctranssexualism\u201d that doctors would require in order to perform a sex reassignment surgery. At the same time as (binary) trans voices attempt to hide the liminal form through clear construction of a \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d self, the same liminal form is exaggerated into a superhuman stardom in popular art.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Androgyny is made remote by these depictions as superhuman, unnatural, or even divine, and as such it is placed into the realm of the \u201cOther,\u201d to use the terminology of de Beauvoir. This makes the non-male non-female body ironically a fertile ground for feminist analysis. As such, as second-wave feminism grappled with the meaning of femininity, the liminal form was open to interpretation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>-Matthew Lindheim-Marx<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seemingly as old as time itself is the human fascination with the liminal form. Something about the aesthetics of someone \u201cin-between\u201d male and female seems to be unusually compelling to authors. In classical times, there was the Greek story of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/lindheim-marx\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"sidebar-page.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-936","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1534,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/936\/revisions\/1534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}