Bournemouth University in association with if: book UK announces the seventh annual New Media Writing Prize, now open for entries.

The competition encourages writers working with digital media to showcase their skills. It also aims to provoke discussion and raise awareness of new-media storytelling. There are five awards: Best New Media Writing, Best Student, The Dot Award, and the Gorkana Journalism Awards (new for this year).

THE PRIZES ARE:

• £1000, donated by if: book UK for the Best New Media Writing
• a 3-month paid work-placement at top e-learning company, Unicorn Training, in Dorset, UK, for the Best Student
• £500 and development support, for The Dot Prize, donated by if: book UK for the best idea for a new project
• £500 for the Gorkana Journalism Award, UK category
• £500 for the Gorkana Journalism Award, International category

The judging panels are looking for great storytelling (fiction or non-fiction) written specifically for delivery and reading/viewing on a PC or Mac, or a hand-held device such as an iPad or mobile phone. It could be a short story, novel, documentary, or poem, using words, images, film, or animation, with audience interactivity.

Whether you’re a student, a professional, or simply an enthusiast, anyone can apply. It’s an international competition, open to all outside the UK. Entries must be in English.

The deadline is Wednesday, November 30th, 2016 at 12 noon GMT. Closing date for students is Friday, December 16th at 12 noon GMT. Entry details can be found on the New Media Writing Prize website.

Shortlisted entrants will be invited to the awards ceremony on the 18^th January 2017 where the winner will be announced. There will be substantial media coverage for the Awards, and winners will be given full acknowledgement in all press releases and related material.

An esteemed panel of judges will select winning entries which will be published on the high profile new media web-hub, The Literary Platform, the Bournemouth University website and will be showcased at the Awards Ceremony in January 2017.

For full details on what we are looking for, and how to enter, please visit the New Media Writing Prize website.

The first ever UK competition to find the best new examples of popular digital fiction has been launched by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition, run by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University, and part of the AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction project, is inviting entries from people across the UK and in two languages – English and Welsh.

Digital fictions are different to e-books and are known as ‘born digital’, as they would lose some of their form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium.

Digital fictions require the reader to interact with the narrative throughout the reading experience. This may include hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. In many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative by controlling a character’s journey through the story.

Hypertexts, text-adventure games, multimedia stories, interactive video, literary games, and some mobile apps are all examples of types of digital fiction.

There are five prizes up for grabs in the competition – Judges’ Prize, People’s Choice, Welsh Language Prize*, Student Prize and Children’s Story Prize.

Winners will receive a cash prize, publication on the Reading Digital Fiction website, and a series of mentoring meetings with select judges on a future digital fiction project.

Dr Alice Bell, a reader in the Humanities department at Sheffield Hallam University, is running the Reading Digital Fiction project with Dr Lyle Skains from Bangor University, a practitioner-researcher in digital fiction in the School of Creative Studies and Media.

Dr Bell said: “There is a new generation of readers and writers who see digital media as a dynamic and genuinely immersive means of experiencing fiction. We’re trying to capture that within the Reading Digital Fiction project by engaging with established audiences as well as introducing more readers to this form of storytelling.

“The competition is designed to expand digital fiction readership to include a broader segment of the public and is open all writers – from rookies to veterans – and all types of digital fiction. We’re keen to see entries that will be accessible to different audiences compatible across different devices.”

Dr Skains said: “As a writer of digital fiction, I’m excited to see the public engage more with it, and to see more popular forms emerging from this engagement. Our judges, too, have expressed a keen interest in seeing what digital fiction can do once it hits the mainstream. We’re really pleased to have such high profile judges join the panel, from very popular digital fiction writers to Welsh-language researchers in digital media and creativity.”

Click here for more information on the competition or to submit an entry.

*(Welsh language entries are eligible for all prize categories).

The interior northwestern United States is remote: impenetrable mountains, untamed rivers, and disorienting prairies paired with unpredictable and extreme weather. Once an intricate patchwork of territories occupied by Nez Perce, Salish, Blackfeet, Pend O’Reille, and Sioux, the region has undergone a post-colonial identity shift to that of ranching and hydropower, agriculture and wilderness playground. In the one-hundred-and-fifty years of Euroamerican occupation, it has become birthplace and life landscape for generations of non-indigenous people who, in the footsteps of novelist Wallace Stegner, claim nativeness. I am one of these natives, born in Montana near the Custer Battlefield. The West is a part of my identity, much as it was for the indigenous people before me. We have experienced in common the warm, wet wind of a chinook ushering in spring after the brutal cold of winter. We’ve tasted brook trout and suffered under the punishing sun on sagebrush prairies. We have contextualized our lives and humanity against the backdrop of rugged peaks so grand that rivers are divided. To grow up in the rural west is to experience its hardships and sweetness first-hand, directly, with your sleeves rolled up and grit under your nails.

For early non-indigenous natives like Stegner, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota[i] in 1890 ended the Indian Wars and opened the west to white settlement. Euroamerican writers, looking back on a hard fought victory, entered an era of romanticizing and mythologizing the West and the fortitude of settlers. They mythologized Euroamerican hardship in the face of a wild land in which Indians were summarily dismissed as “the vanished people.”

The name Nez Perce, to me, was first perceived as a region within the United States Forest Service. Only later I understood it as the tribe of indigenous people whose tools we collected in the tilled soil of our garden and landmarks we witnessed. When the television drama I Will Fight No More Forever (I Will Fight No More Forever, 1975) aired, my childhood friends and I hailed Chief Joseph for his bravery in attempting to out-pace the US Army with his entire tribe—children and elderly among them—in tow. With heart-felt allegiance, we mourned Joseph’s defeat just miles from the Canadian border, and we repeated his now-famous words, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” (Beal, 1963) Like ghosts, Indians were present in our lives in ways that we imagined were meaningful, but they were seldom present among us.

Wallace Stegner’s literary contemporaries included so-called “vanished” Indian authors such as D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch; some writing about the very landscape to which Stegner claimed himself not just native, but indigenous. McNickle, a member of the Salish & Kootenai Confederated Tribes, wrote about the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. My family’s ranch was a part of McNickle’s 1936 landscape, and because it was white-owned by 1917 it represents the reality of Euroamerican settlement on treaty land as he described in his work. I had Indian contemporaries of my own growing up. Sherman Alexie was stretching his literary wings on the Spokane Indian Reservation not far away while I was immersing myself in Wild West movies starring Clint Eastwood and other iconic actors. These movies represented Hollywood’s golden years, and they taught a revisionist history to generations of Americans—perhaps the world—about the West and what it represented. Genre Westerns—books or film—have iconized the West in ways that undoubtedly damaged Native Americans, but also the viability of literary artists from the region. Our work is often pigeon-holed in preconceived tropes that readers and scholars alike skip over it with little regard for its merit. But as a child and a member of the colonizing race, I was anesthetized at best and completely ignorant at worst, to problems this mythology created, as well as the cultural conflict that remains.

Alexie, in his twenties, began boldly writing about privilege through its absence. But it took me years longer to find my voice. My experience growing up in the remotest parts of the West, my connectedness to the landscape and its power to shape or kill people, made me a regional writer by default. I had no choice but to tell the story of life here. And while my burgeoning understanding of the cultural conflict was an impetus for my writing, recognizing my unwitting participation in the Indian Wars gave my voice a tentative timbre. As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn suggested in her essay “Why I can’t read Wallace Stegner” I, too, was aware that we might “discover the unwelcome news that we have been enemies and perhaps still are.” (Cook-Lynn, 1996, p. 33) For a child in love with Chief Joseph, this was a staggering recognition—a chrysalis releasing an identity crisis. Like many regional authors, my work has omitted Indians and their influence on my life in the West entirely.

As an outspoken member of the community of Native American Scholars, Cook-Lynn’s assessment of Stegner includes the following criticism of all Euroamerican writers:

The principal perpetrators of a wrongful history, as far as Stegner was concerned, are allowed to melt into the heroic and hopefull future of America with no more than an expression of regret. Such terrible regret is expressed so beautifully that readers are helpless to resist a sympathetic emotional response. This is the power of Stegner and those who preceded him, and those American writers of the West who follow. They all become part of the American literary movement which claims possession of the American West. … Un-self-consciously, they write about the plains and the American Indian and their own experiences in an attempt to clarify their own identities. (Cook-Lynn, 1996, pp. 31-32)

Given the historical depiction of Indians by Euroamerican writers throughout history, it seems reasonable for Indians to draw hard boundaries around the reclamation of Indian identity. I don’t want to contribute to a history of inaccuracy and cultural appropriation, though clarifying my identity, as Cook-Lynn states it, requires that I write about my experiences in the West. But as a writer sitting down to her craft, it would deny the larger truth of my own experience to suggest that I omit Indians and Indian influence when writing about characters who reside here, and specifically Euroamerican characters who live on treaty land, which is an undeniable truth today. In the context of creative writing, and especially the art of fiction, it is the work of authors like myself to produce a complex, multi-layered story that deals with a universal condition. Within that discipline, omitting other races is not simply too restrictive, it contributes to the revisionist history we seek to avoid. It cannot answer the questions: What of the interracial experience? And beyond that, the bi-racial experience that is frequently the outcome of such unions? Astute authors have significant contributions to make to the literary tradition of the West as it applies to these cross-cultural matters, regardless of their race. I often seek to understand these things: How do Euroamerican authors native to the West write about the racially charged tension of our generation without appropriating indigenous identity or making the same romantic or racist missteps of our predecessors?

To help answer these questions I researched twentieth and twenty-first century Native American literature, tracing their depiction of Euroamericans and other ethnic characters. The depiction of interracial relationship, in particular, stood out for me, as characters attempted to bridge the cultural divide through intimate relationships. These love interests and sexual encounters illustrated a more personal effort to overcome racial biases by understanding a member of another race intimately. They seemed, in many cases, to transcend racial biases, but not without significant struggle. Perhaps this approach was also personal to me because I have been married to a man from another culture, religion, and country for most of my adult life. The depiction of these characters’ struggles and hardships was identifiable and consistent with my own experience.

I found that Native American authors like Cook-Lynn, Alexie, D’Arcy McNickle, and Janet Campbell-Hale did not shy away from inside first- and third-person perspectives of Euroamerican characters. And Alexie writes from the perspective of a variety of races (white, black, Indian, and bi-racial), as well as gender. And within those characters he creates a variety of racist, non-racist, and interracial perspectives.

D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded (McNickle, 1936) is among the first Indian works in the tradition of American novelists. In it, he explores the issue of non-Indian settlers on reservation land through the perspective of the mixed-race character, Archilde Leon. Born to a Salish mother (Catherine) and Spanish father (Max), Archilde straddles both white and Indian worlds. Max operates a ranch and embodies the Euroamerican Individualist archetype so thoroughly that he lives alone in a large, modern ranch house while his Indian wife and mother of his twelve children remains in a rustic cabin nearby. When her tribal community arrives to celebrate Archilde’s return from Indian boarding school, they pitch their teepees in the forest and share a feast. But Max remains in his house, listening to their tribal stories. Though he is fluent in Salish, he cannot comprehend his wife’s people for cultural reasons. Max is likewise perplexed by his own children, who have disappointed him. He doesn’t understand why his sons go fishing instead of working the ranch. To him they are lazy and wild, they do not possess good work ethics, and they are unworthy to inherit his land. But the fish they catch, which Max’s wife prepares without him, is his son’s contribution to family existence.

As a member of the dominant culture, even on the reservation, Max assumes that his wife and children will conform to his way, discounting the cultural differences between them. Catherine was the daughter of the old chief, and though she has been schooled by Jesuit nuns in Euroamerican homemaking, that has remained nothing but a curiosity to her. She lets the stove Max bought rust from disuse while she cooks over an open fire. The butter churn dries and falls apart, and the wash tubs are battered out of shape by her children while she soaks the clothing in the creek. Catherine also feels the brunt of the differences between them:

Even without those complications it was difficult to be a white man’s wife. In the old way of living one never stayed in one place for very long. One camped wherever there was game and grass and water for the horses. . . . When the old way came to an end and the Indians had to live on the Reservation, the habit of moving persisted; people went visiting. They would live on their allotment until they got restless; then they would take their tepee poles and travel to some relative’s place . . . A white man does not care to have his relatives or his wife’s relatives come live with him. He will slam his door in their faces. (McNickle, 1936, p. 172)

Though Max and Catherine are estranged, they remain married, if separate. On his death bed, Max admits that Catherine was not the cause of his troubles and offers reconciliation. It’s important to him that he not die without mending the relationship. Yet he behaves as a European patriarch, telling Catherine he doesn’t blame her, rather than asking her to forgive him.

McNickle uses assumptions of common understanding between two cultures with vastly different mythologies and world views to show how unpredictable and illogical they seem to each other. The Indians in The Surrounded show both confusion about the white world and its laws, and distrust of whites themselves because of it. With the interracial relationship, McNickle offers both perspectives in order to illustrate the origins of that distrust, such as the hunting regulation that prohibits killing female deer to protect next year’s fawns. Only after the animal is killed are the Indians aware of the regulation. They have been accustomed to abundant game and have historically taken young, tender animals regardless of sex. Failure to understand and adopt the dominant culture’s world view, thought, does not protect them from the law, regardless of their logic, giving the novel a powerful point.

In Sherman Alexie’s 2012 short story “Assimilation” (Alexie, 2012), he takes on the issue of interracial marriage with frank openness and scrutiny and with a same-race infidelity twist. Mary Lynn is a Coeur d’Alene Indian married to a white engineer, and the story opens with her determined search for any random Indian man to have “indigenous” sex with. She is filled with angst about her identity, not because she feels bad about being Indian, but because she wishes that being Coeur d’Alene was a description rather than “an excuse, reason, prescription, placebo, prediction, or diminutive.” (Alexie, 2012, p. 332) She is fully aware that she is cheating on her white husband because he’s white. Alexie brings the historic animosity of the two races down to the relationship level.

After a clumsy and unromantic sexual act in a cheap motel with a Lummi Indian who Mary Lynn meets in a diner, she meets her white husband for dinner at a trendy Seattle restaurant. Mary Lynn is a woman with children and broad sexual experiences, but she has never experienced sex with another Indian. She uses this fact to justify her infidelity to herself, calling it a political act.

If forced to admit the truth, or some version of the truth, she’d testify she was about to go to bed with an Indian stranger because she wanted to know how it would feel. Why not practice a carnal form of affirmative action? By God, her infidelity was a political act. Rebellion, resistance, revolution! (Alexie, 2012, p. 333)

Alexie illuminates the prejudice against Indians by embodying those prejudices within his Indian characters. This technique brings their prejudices into the spotlight in a way that gives those prejudices more credence. He also uses extreme comparisons, such as when a reservation Indian compares his people with the Jews who survived the death camps as those who lied, cheated, murdered, stole, and subverted. Alexie shows us how Mary Lynn ended up with a white husband from her own place of prejudice, and why that prejudice undermines her happiness.

White men had never disappointed her, but they’d never surprised her either. White men were neutral, she thought, just like Belgium! And when has Belgium ever been sexy? When has Belgium caused a grown woman to shake with fear and guilt? She didn’t want to feel Belgium; she wanted to feel dangerous. (Alexie, 2012, p. 335)

By Mary Lynn’s admission that she desires dangerous men, Alexie then restores the dignity of those he has just excoriated, which brings the reader back to the understanding that these are prejudices not realities. Alexie repeats this pattern throughout the story. Mary Lynn imagines that her husband, Jeremiah, as “out there” with eighty-seven other white men on business trips, wearing suits, but not their best suits, staying in similar business-class hotels, each separately watching pay-per-view porno. That it is a predictable white-man existence creates a prejudice, but her belief that they deserve better, reversing the ugly stereotype with her idea that they are smarter and more tender and generous than the white men who came before them neutralizes the prejudice, restoring them as human beings once again.

Alexie turns up the volume on the racial tension while the couple waits outside for a table, bringing the exchange to a near fight. When Jeremiah claims to know the difference between individual Asian ethnicities, Mary Lynn accuses him of being an Indian, and his response is harsh for a man speaking to his wife of twenty years.

Fucking an Indian doesn’t make me an Indian. (Alexie, 2012, p. 340)

It’s followed by a short exchange about whether they should stay or go, on the surface meaning the restaurant, but the subtext implies the marriage. They’ve come to the brink—the deciding point. They are now openly hostile and using language reserved for enemies, as the two races have historically been.

Once again, as soon as racial tensions are at their peak, Alexie reverses course, retreating from overt stereotypes into family life, softening the conflict through thoughts about their four children. Their two boys take after Mary Lynn—obviously Indian to the casual observer. Their two girls resemble their father—blond and fair. When they mutually acknowledge that the boys get preferential treatment from both sets of grandparents, Jeremiah vows to love his girls more to make up for the inequity, but he also wonders if he’s doing it simply because they look like him. Mary Lynn wonders if they should have another child to determine once and for all whether they are an Indian family or a white family.

What Alexie achieves in “Assimilation” is not simply a story about an interracial couple struggling with common cultural misunderstanding, but a stark juxtaposition of the ugliest and most prevalent stereotypes from both racial perspectives. The point is clear when the couple, after infidelity, fighting, and the parsing of children by ethnic similarities, finally get to the root of the issue, and it is the insidiousness of it that bubbles out.

[They] had often discussed race as a concept, as a foreign country they occasionally visited, or as an enemy that existed outside their house, a destructive force they could fight against as a couple, as a family. But race was also a constant presence, a houseguest and permanent tenant who crept around all the rooms in their shared lives, opening drawers, stealing utensils and small articles of clothing, changing the temperature. (Alexie, 2012, p. 344)

In this perpetual cycle of glaring racial tension followed by a retreat into compassion, Alexie uses bold language to punctuate the emotion. Mary Lynn, when angry about men, invokes a mantra in her head wherein she chants hate hate hate and then lets it go. Three times in the story, she goes through her mantra and releases it. The story appropriately unites the couple at the close. The premise and execution leading up to the reconciliation are an analogy for assimilation because assimilation is ultimately a process of recognizing one’s prejudice, acknowledging the hatred it invokes, and then releasing it and stepping forward on the same path. The story glimpses into the real work of overcoming racial prejudice and maintaining an interracial marriage. It is also an outstanding model for authors seeking a balanced technique for depicting those racial prejudices within the context of overcoming them.

Understanding the techniques used to engender fictional characters within a work with varying viewpoints, including extreme racism, without making the overall nature of the work racist was the goal of my research. In close examination of Alexie’s narrative structure and narrative voice, I found that he demonstrates a strong empathy for each of his characters, and he does so with a clear purpose to illuminate the hardships of race relations from each of their perspectives. This was highly useful for my own writing—racism exists, and many people are not looking the other way, but attempting to understand their own relationship with it. As a writer, I cannot shy away from criticism over assuming other racial identities if I am going to achieve a clear depiction of interracial relationships and cultural tension in my work. When I began my research, I didn’t expect to instill extreme views in my characters, but it was important to understand the extremes in order to determine where my characters fell on the racist continuum. Now I recognize that my characters can be anywhere on the continuum without automatically making the work itself racist or being guilty of appropriation.

There are four specific techniques that I identified for use in my own work:

• Alignment with historic context. Alignment with historic context combats racial stereotypes and allows the reader to experience a character’s full situation in the story. To ignore actual events that are significant to the development of racial perspectives, such as systematic removal of Indian children from their homes, sets characters adrift and robs the reader of information that puts behavior into context.
• Outsider perspective. One of the most effective ways, I found, of depicting cultural differences and nuances is through an “outsider” characters, or someone who is from neither race involved in the conflict. Outsider characters are allowed to make mistakes, offend, learn, and earn forgiveness, and their journeys can illuminate truths about other cultures that the reader might never experience first-hand.
• Racism from within. One of the most powerful techniques for illustrating racism is through the inclusion of racist ideas about a group from a character within that group. For example, Mary Lynn’s thoughts about Indian men making her afraid, and her husband’s thoughts about how white people created racism in order to enslave blacks and kill Indians. When the character is of the same race as the racist concept it is easier to show these biases as simply that and not truths.
• Rotating (or circular) racism. Particularly with the inclusion of interracial couples, there is a privilege that comes from familiarity. This allows characters to make highly racist statements, either out of affection or during battle. But the characters must then consider their commitment to the other-race spouse/lover and see past those racist feelings into the humanity of their partner. Through this technique the author can bring the racism to the surface, then transcend it.

In my own work, and specifically a novel titled A Delicate Divide, I use the concepts of interracial relationships to transcend racism within my characters. Set in Montana, the story unfolds in the same location as D’Arcy McNickle’s 1936 novel The Surrounded. Written roughly eighty years apart, the two novels, when read in succession, will render an epic story of integrated life on the Flathead. McNickle’s novel takes place at the peak of institutionalized dismantling and iradication of Indian culture. His characters are subject to laws they do not understand as they watch their treaty land infiltrated by outsiders. The Catholic church, a looming Gothic structure built in 1890, is central to his narrative. His characters straddle Christianity and the forbidden religious practices of their forebearers. In my work, the church remains a central landmark in the town, and the characters straddle Christianity and the rejection of all religion in the face of modern life. In McNickle’s novel, the Indians are forbidden from speaking their native language, and the children are systematically sent away to boarding schools where they are “assimilated” into white culture. In my novel, the highway project touts signs in Salish, translated into English for the benefit of those passing through, and the cultural center undertakes an aggressive project to glean traditional stories from elders before they are lost forever. In McNickle’s novel the white law prevails, and in my novel, the confederated tribes have discovered the power of the legal system and are aggressively reclaiming treaty land and lost rights.

As I studied McNickle’s work it became apparent that telling the contemporary story of water rights in A Delicate Divide was not quite enough to give the reader a full comprehnsion of the events that took place in the interviening eighty years between McNickle’s work and my own. Some of these events included the decline of the tribes into poverty, the rise of addiction, the removal of children to white foster homes, the rise of the American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee II[ii], the subsequent rise of the cultural preservation movement, and the eventual adoption of the Euroamerican legal system to preserve tribal sovereignty. To illustrate these important events between the works I added a historic storyline based on an early white settler to the region, and then follow his descendants. My work opens with the purchase of land in 1911, which has been deemed surplus by the government after the allocation of parcels to Indians under the General Allotment Act of 1905.[iii] I also borrowed two of McNickle’s characters from The Surrounded: George Moser, the merchant and land speculator, and his wife. Moser’s wife is the primary racist representative in McNickle’s work, and in many respects she sets the tone for the next forty years of overt racism that my characters witness. By including her in my work, I am giving body and voice to what McNickle only alluded to in 1936 (she does not actually appear on the page). I can only guess that his treatment of her character might have been more direct had he been writing at a later time in history.

The Rocky Mountain setting, rugged and beautiful, represents more than the location of the Flathead Reservation. The West is central to what it means to be American. The folklore of the West, as illustrated by the movies of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and the plethera of Euroamerican authors like A.B. Guthrie and Wallace Stegner, is entrenched in the modern American psyche. Generations of Euroamericans like myself have grown up believing that this landscape and narrative is wholly our own. It is important to me, as an author and native Westerner, to bring a broader perspective to our existence here—that of a single chapter in an ongoing narrative. A very small slice in the history of all that has come before, and all that will come after.

[i] In 1890 Cavalry Soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Minneconjous men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It is considered the last episode of the Indian Wars, and is commonly described as “The Massacre at Wounded Knee.”

[ii] Wounded Knee II is defined as the 71-day siege of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota by Oglala Sioux protesting corruption among tribal officials and the US government’s failure to fulfill innumerable treaties throughout history. More than 60 deaths are attributed to the protest.

[iii] The Dawes Act was passed by congress in 1887. It is also known as the General Allotment Act and the Land Allotment Act, and was adopted by individual states at different times subsequently. Montana enacted the law in 1905. The Flathead Reservation was divided into parcels and each Indian head of household was granted 160 acres under the law. The remaining land was deemed “surplus” and sold for settlement. This is how treaty land first came into Euroamerican ownership.

Alexie, S., 1995. Reservation Blues. Paperback ed. New York: Warner Books.

Alexie, S., 2012. Blasphemy. New York: Grove Press.

Balch, R., 2006. THE RISE AND FALL OF ARYAN NATIONS:. Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 34(1), pp. 81-113.

Beal, M., 1963. I Will Fight No More Forever. 2nd ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bremer, K., 2014. My Accidental Jihad. First ed. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.

Brown, D., 1970. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Bantam.

Chopin, K., 2015. The Kate Chopin International Society. [Online]
Available at: http://www.katechopin.org/desirees-baby-text/
[Accessed 2 April 2016].

Cook-Lynn, E., 1991. From the River’s Edge. First ed. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Cook-Lynn, E., 1996. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice.. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press..

Doris, M., 1987. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. 1988 Trade Paperback ed. New York: Warner Books, Inc..

Erdrich, L., 1984. Love Medicine. First ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Erdrich, L., 2013. The Round House. First ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

Frazier, I., 2001. On The Rez. 1st ed. New York: Picador.

Hale, J., 1984. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. New York: Random House.

I Will Fight No More Forever. 1975. [Film] Directed by R. Heffron. U.S.: Wolper Productions.

I Will Fight No More Forever. 1975. [Film] Directed by R. Heffron. USA: Wolper Productions.

Kidd, S. M., 2001. The Secret Life of Bees. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Books.

King, T., 1989. Medicine River. First ed. Toronto: Viking Canada.

Krupat, A., 2002. Red Matters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Leslie, C., 1984. Winterkill. First ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Lundquist, S., 2004. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd / Books.

Magpie Earling, D., 2002. Perma Red. First ed. New York: Blue Hen Books.

Marmon Silko, L., 2013. Yellow Woman. In: M. Puncher, ed. Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 1683-1690.

McNickle, D., 1936. The Surrounded. Albuquerque: New Mexico Press.

McNiff, K., 2013. Art As Research: Opportunities and Challenges. 1st ed. Bristol: Intellect.

Norman, H., 2001. Norther Lights. First ed. New York: Picador.

Oregonian, 2014. Teen threatens American Airlines with Al Qaida action, tweets go viral. [Online]
Available at: www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2014/04/teen_twitter_american_airlines.html
[Accessed 15 April 2014].

Owens, L., 1985. Other Destinies. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Parini, J., 1995. John Steinbeck. First ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc..

Steinbeck, J., 1936. Of Mice and Men. sixth ed. New York: Penguin.

Steinbeck, J., 1938. Tortilla Flat. 2nd ed. New York: Viking Penguin Inc..

Stevenson, A. & Waite, M., 2011. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Twelfth ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vizenor, G., 1990. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Welch, J., 1974. Winter In The Blood. New York: Harper & Row.

Womack, C., 1999. Red on Red, Native American Literary Separatism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Heather Sharfeddin is a Pacific Northwest novelist whose work has earned starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal, has been honored with an Erick Hoffer award and at the New York and San Francisco Book Festivals, as well as the Pacific Northwest Book Sellers Association. She has taught creative writing at Randolph College, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Linfield College (presently). She is also a book reviewer for Colorado Review. Her fifth novel What Keeps You is due out in late 2016. Sharfeddin holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University (Bath, England).

…Writing a Transgender Character as a Political Act, and the Linguistic Potential for Change.

The personal, according to Carol Hanisch, is political[i]. Which partner, in any relationship, makes the tea is political. Who loads the washing machine and puts it on to cycle is political. Who – literally – wears the trousers is political. To this list, which is of course by no means exhaustive, I would like to add the deceptively obvious suggestion that speech, and (more pertinent to my own case as a novelist) writing, is political, too, both in terms of what is written, and in who is writing it. Words, whether we would choose them to or not, have a political life and impact beyond that of our intentions. Words are a form of action[ii].

I consider myself, and describe myself as, a trans person. My trans status is, thanks to both my own openness and a degree of over exuberance on the part of my French publisher, a matter of public record in the UK and across Europe. I have no idea why I am transgender. If pressed I will come down on the social constructivist side of the argument, but I consider it fruitless, misleading and ultimately counterproductive to spend any significant amount of time worrying whether transgender identity has a biological basis or a social one. Such inquiry, in my opinion, derives its impetus from the cisgenderist assumption that to be transgender is to be wrong, and that this wrongness must be described, understood and contained before it can become socially acceptable. I don’t expect to be understood and I won’t be contained – but I am not afraid to demand acceptance.

The term “cisgender” comes from the Latin prefix “cis” meaning “on the same side”. It is used in opposition to the term “trans” which comes from the Latin “cross over” to mean somebody whose gender identity is congruent with that which is implied by their bodily make up. Like “transgender” it has nothing to do with sexuality, gender expression or the presence (or absence) of any intersex condition. A cisgendered gay man can wear flowery dresses and identify strongly as male. A transgender gay man can do exactly the same. “Cisgenderism”, on the other hand, along with its derivation “cisgenderist” is the usually unspoken assumption that attributes normality to cisgendered people and otherness to trans people. It differs from transphobia, which is individual, emotional, and sometimes violently reactionary, in being institutionalised, socially acceptable, and until interrogated, bearing the assumption of a reasonable basis.[iii]

I am using the term ‘transgender’ in this work to refer to anybody who identifies at any place upon the transgender and transsexual spectrum. Such a person may identify fully as male or female, or – as in my own case – may fluctuate between both genders or occupy an identity entirely without gender altogether. My sense of myself as a gendered being is complex and shifts between male and female depending on the social context I am in and on my frame of mind. I identify as – and name myself – a transgender man, using ‘man’ not to mean an individual with a certain anatomy who has been raised in a particular, gendering, manner, but a ‘man’ in the Beauvoirian sense of being ‘one’ [iv] – a free and active member of society whose gendered identity is not defined primarily by relation to any other, or considered ‘other’ or ‘lacking’ in relation to a primary standard, but stands on its own. I do not use the word ‘transsexual’ as I see no meaningful distinction between sex and gender, and therefore I do not agree with the implication of physical essentialism that the term carries. Neither do I name myself simply ‘man’ because ‘man’, used by itself, appears to oversimplify my identity and subject it to a large number of assumptions – many of which are every bit as cripplingly sexist as the notion that ‘woman’ is inherently ‘other’. If there ever comes a day when the word ‘man’ is linguistically free from (cis)sexism, I may start using it without the ‘transgender’  prefix. But I wouldn’t bet on it; the word ‘transgender’ describes for me something that is becoming a positive identity in its own right. ‘Transition’ implies movement – a positive alterity, an existence unlimited by the artificial, gendered, binary between man and woman – a state of linguistic and political potentiality. To name myself simply ‘man’, therefore, would constitute for me an attempt to pretend that the road my gender identity continues to travel upon does not matter; when, for me, the journey is more important than any possibility of a destination.

What I am, or at least how I identify in terms of gender, matters to my writing because I am a transgender human being who performs, according to the citational definition of performing gender put forward by Judith Butler, as male[v]. I read and write about other authors both as a transperson and a novelist, and my responses must be understood in this light. In the case of Rainbow I am writing in the early twenty first century about another, fictional, transgender human performing a similar masculine gender, who is living at the end of the eighteenth. This parallel between my self and my character adds a certain tension to my work which would not be there if I were a cisgender person of either sex. Since Roland Barthes proclaimed the author dead it has seemed unadvisable, at least within the field of poststructuralist literary criticism, to consider the work of any writer in any significant relation to that writer’s own life and personal circumstances, but I am all too aware that for the general reading public for whom my novel is intended, these biographical considerations will loom very large. My audience will, without doubt, ask the question of how much I, Jack Wolf, have in common with Mary Anne Ashley/Paul Smith. They will want to know to what extent I identify with herm; whether herm formative experiences are also mine, whether I ever had my heart broken by a blonde bombshell called Lily Chivers. And they will ask me, what do you mean by this? Of course, in a way, I am inviting such questioning – at this point in our culture there is still something overtly provocative in a transgender novelist’s deliberately writing a transgendered character in a historical novel. My answer is to say that I mean to show that trans people existed, and they were – to some extent at least – people like me. We trans folk have a history, as well as – hopefully – a future.

Nevertheless, it would be ridiculously simplistic to assume that Mary Anne/Paul is equivalent to Jack Wolf, just as it would be naive to assume that Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness is equivalent to John Radclyffe Hall, whose own life with her long term lover Una Troubridge did not, whatever internal conflicts she may have endured, reflect the misery Hall inflicts upon her hapless ‘invert’. I can vouch for the fact that I have never taken a sailing ship to the Caribbean and have never been involved in any attempt at bloody revolution – although I freely acknowledge that in my performances of gender I am hoping to help bring about a quiet one. I do not speak in Somerset dialect either, although I grew up hearing it; the acceptance of received English pronunciation was drummed into me from about the age of eleven as forcibly, and, it appears, more penetratingly, than the acceptance of the gendered norms that inhere within language itself. The fact that Mary Anne/Paul does speak in dialect is due primarily to my effort to destabilise the class, rather than the gender norms, that can be reproduced within literary language. Nevertheless, the old Somerset dialect provides a very flexible verbal tool with which to challenge linguistic gendering as it typically lacked the pronoun “it” and referred to inanimate objects as “ee” or “er” in both subject and object positions. There is no attempt to maintain any consistent grammatical gender and the same object can be represented by both pronouns within one sentence[vi]. Mary Anne/Paul’s lack of formal education and unfamiliarity with ‘proper’ grammar allows herm a degree of syntactical – and even intellectual – freedom which is critical in terms of my attempt within Rainbow to reformulate the meaning of masculinity in a trans framework. The term “herm”, which I am using in this study, is not however drawn from dialect and does not appear in the novel. It is a modern pronoun proposed by the transgender and intersex activist and author Del Grace Volcano as a combination of her and him. It is used when talking about someone whose gender identity (and/or body) combines male and female, or varies between them. Mary Anne/Paul develops a male identity but in the earlier parts of the novel identifies as female  – so I feel that in discussing herm within the earlier sections of the novel and in the novel as a whole, this pronoun is appropriate. It is one of a number of pronouns that are currently being trialled to perform this function within the English speaking transgender community, and may not be the one that is ultimately accepted as definitive. However, I find its descriptiveness helpful and so have chosen to use it here.

So; I am not Mary Anne/ Paul Smith, nor is s/he, in any simplistic pseudo-autobiographical sense, my alter ego. But as I have admitted that I would like to bring about a quiet revolution, I must also admit that in a complex, discursive, disingenuous, politically motivated sense, MaryAnne/Paul is indeed my literary stand in, my mouthpiece – even, shall we say, for this is the twenty-first century after all – my sock puppet. I am a trans person, and I have chosen to raise a trans voice. And that voice is a rare one, historically rendered silent either by the cisgendering norms of the cultures of its own and later times, or – as in recent years – by a degree of appropriation by members of the gay and lesbian community, who (understandably, having themselves, historically, been silenced) have often leapt upon evidence of gender ambiguity in historical people as evidence of their possessing a lesbian, pre-lesbian or other homosexual identity. According to this theory, eighteenth and nineteenth century female bodied people who cross-dressed as men were female identified women, who had the misfortune of being born years before the advent of either gender equality or lesbian pride, but who would have proudly identified as lesbian feminists if they had been able to do so[vii]. While I sincerely doubt that anyone from earlier centuries would have experienced a trans gender identity in a way that is wholly identical to that of a modern trans person, this line of reasoning makes the equivalent mistake in claiming a cisgender lesbian identity for historic cross dressers. And though we cannot say for certain what any individual’s private sense of gender may have been, there is little clear evidence that earlier generations prioritised the genitalia in determining an adult person’s functional gender to the same extent that we do now. Gender in the eighteenth century, for good or ill, was as much a matter of the body’s clothing as it was of the body itself. Genitals were kept secret and not considered unless the situation was an overtly sexual one. This is true even of eighteenth century medicine, where the physician would typically make a diagnosis based on a verbal consultation with a clothed patient rather than on a medical examination. It is entirely conceivable that cross dressers like James How[viii] and Charles (Mary) Hamilton (made infamous by Fielding’s The Female Husband) experienced a fully masculine gender identity congruent with their period in history and behaved accordingly, with no ‘lack’ that could not be supplied, if the situation called for it, by a decent dildo. This is not to say that bodily gender for female bodied trans men could be easily subverted, or entirely escaped. As the century progressed British culture developed an increasing concern with regulating the dress of women in order to suppress any latent female masculinity, and women who openly desired masculine-appearing clothing were met with censure.  Cross-dressed trans men, if discovered living in apparently sexual relationships with women, could be severely punished. Such punishments included being sent to Bridewell, whipping, and being put in the stocks. Charles Hamilton was himself apprehended for fraud in 1748 and sentenced to be whipped in Glastonbury town square[ix]. Ann Marrow, placed in the stocks in 1777 for dressing as a man and marrying a woman, was permanently blinded as a result[x]. On the other hand, a number of cross dressing women such as Charlotte Charke[xi] chose to marry biological men, opening up the possibility that in our society they could have identified as gay or bisexual transmen. It is also interesting to note that when the genitally male but physically androgynous and apparently female identified Chevalier d’Eon adopted female clothing, also in 1777, her desire to dress in clothing ‘proper’ to her sex was met with approval. It is without the scope of this study to investigate this apparent double standard, which would seem to have allowed androgynous transwomen greater latitude in gender expression than transmen (a situation completely opposite to that experienced by transwomen today). However, given that cross dressing men who frequented London’s molly houses were considered sodomites and fiercely condemned, it seems likely that the Chevalier may have owed her success to the same thing modern transpeople have to rely on – a sympathetic doctor.

It appears likely therefore that although it was possible for some female bodied trans men to change their clothing and ‘pass’ as male, societal interest in keeping ‘women’ in their proper attire and their proper place was strong enough to ensure that only those individuals who already possessed some masculine characteristics and a high degree of motivation were able to do so successfully. It is relevant also that in this period there was a very high tolerance of romantic friendships between women, both married and unmarried, as long as these friends did not admit to any genital contact; and so it is unlikely that many lesbian lovers would have needed to employ the dangerous subterfuge of one of them passing as male. But there are other difficulties, separate from any historical inaccuracy, with the argument that such people were simply lesbians in disguise. This cisgenderist reading of history eclipses trans identities in the historical narrative altogether, distorts our understanding of lesbian history and utterly silences the transgender voice. When a writer of the stature of Radclyffe Hall can write, in strongly heterosexist terms: “I have never felt an impulse towards a man in all my life, this is because I am a congenital invert. For me to sleep with a man would be “wrong” because it would be an outrage against nature”[xii] and still uncomplicatedly be considered a lesbian icon, we have a problem.

Part of my project in writing Rainbow is to discover the essence of that (or at least, my) transgender voice, and to explore what might characterise it: within what sort of language can it be heard? I want to know whether, and if so how, language can be de-or re-gendered, and whether words and concepts that seem to be fixedly associated with one gender and with one way of performing gendered behaviour can be made to re-signify for modern trans people in ways that are positive, flexible and ultimately freeing. And this re-signification matters, not merely in an academic or creative sense, but at a grassroots level. Despite tremendous recent progress in the visual media, particularly in UK and US television[xiii], across the modern world trans voices are still being silenced because they are seen as failing to achieve the artificial standards of masculinity or femininity that are perpetuated within language, and thereby within culture. Sometimes, tragically, we silence ourselves.

So my readers are likely to ask if Mary Anne/Paul is me – and I can answer honestly both “yes” and “no”. But it is unlikely that this will the only question that they will ask. The trans community is both numerically small, and under-represented in fiction to the extent where any work of fiction containing possibly transgender characters and/or themes is excitedly seized upon in much the same way that the emergent lesbian community in the early twentieth century and later decades seized (both mistakenly and unfortunately) upon The Well of Loneliness. There is a great hunger to read positive role models, both trans masculine and feminine, and a deep disappointment, very keenly felt, ensues when, for instance, a trans character turns out not to be trans after all[xiv] or the character’s gender non-conformity is depicted as a negative, even comedic, thing. Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex[xv] provides an example of this. Although he claims to have received praise from the North American intersex community for his depiction of Cal/Calliope Stephanides[xvi], the writer’s stated failure to make contact with any intersex person while writing the novel suggests to me that he did not consider the work at all in terms of an intersex or non-gender conforming audience:

“Just last week, a person came up to me at a reading and whispered in my ear that he has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. He was the first person I’ve ever met with the condition, on account of its rarity.” [xvii]

Eugenides explains his character’s situation, which causes Cal – originally Calliope – to transition from female to male, as being the genetic legacy of close familial incest, and appears to be using the intersex condition partly as a motif to signify sexual sin. In my personal experience, reactions to this sort of representation from the trans and intersex communities are not as positive as Eugenides may think, although some people do express a sense of gratitude at having been represented at all. The infrequency of gender non-conforming characters in fiction and the hunger for representation among such audiences ensures that the book is well known, if not exactly well loved. So it is certain that among the public readers who will ask searching questions of my depiction of transgender masculinity there will be a number of people who are trans themselves – trans masculine, trans feminine, and trans anything in between – and they will want to know that I have not written a transgender character, or positioned such a character within my novel, in any way that could serve as yet another doom laden prophecy or reassertion of the notion that trans existence is essentially flawed. To put it more bluntly, a transgender readership will be keen to see that my work does not encourage, support or promote an interpretation of transgender existence that is transphobic.

It is this sort of sensitivity to the psychological impact of her writing upon a section of her readership that is lacking in Radclyffe Hall. Judith (Jack) Halberstam suggests that although The Well of Loneliness was intended for general publication, Hall’s writing is really meant for the people like her who made up her Paris Circle of acquaintances – socially transgressive, educated, upper or upper middle class women such as Gertrude Stein and Toupie Lowther who had attained a degree of economic independence and had overcome any psychological and practical barriers posed by their unconventional sexual tastes or manner of gender expression to achieve a degree of social freedom that was certainly not experienced by the typical trans man or lesbian woman of the time[xviii]. Hall’s ideal reader is one who is already sufficiently secure in herm own identity that s/he is able to read the story of Stephen Gordon as neither fable nor prophecy. S/he will not assume on the basis of Stephen’s misery that loneliness and abandonment is the inevitable fate of the invert and understand from herm own experience the difference between fiction and reflection. The real life lesbian or transgender reader of The Well of Loneliness, particularly before the 1960s when lesbian and trans-masculine people began to achieve a greater degree of visibility, has not typically been able to do this. Lacking experience of others like her(m), s/he has often given in to the temptation to believe on some level both that loneliness is the lot of the lesbian and that the inferiority inherent within Radclyffe Hall’s depiction of masculinity without a penis is an essential truth. Lesbian fiction between the publication of The Well of Loneliness and the 1960s tended to reflect this[xix]. Of course, second and third wave feminism – and lesbian feminism in particular – vehemently rejected this premise and strove hard to disprove any notion that to be without a penis is to be in a Freudian position of lack. Women, they pointed out (and I would add non or pre operative trans men) do not lack anything; what they have is a vagina.

But Radclyffe Hall, whose understanding of gender had been strongly influenced by the work both of Freud and the sexologist Havelock Ellis, is not a feminist writer. She positions the invert as possessing a failed masculinity that has, to borrow and twist a metaphor from the pheasant shooting enjoyed by Stephen Gordon’s aristocratic father, gone off at half cock. This is most startlingly clear in one often critiqued scene in The Well of Loneliness. In it, Stephen Gordon, standing in front of the mirror, finally faces up to the real physical condition of herm body and admits to hermself the likely implications of the truth that is staring herm in the face: that body is not a male one. I have deliberately drawn upon this scene in Rainbow, in an attempt both to pay something of an homage to the idea of the invert and to subvert the notion that Hall apparently accepts: that gender is fixed in and by the body.

In writing Mary Anne/Paul, therefore, I am re-claiming trans history in the hope of doing some small good for trans people now, and in the future. I am deliberately seeking to create a transgender character who is clever, attractive, heroic and convincingly masculine (I will come back shortly to what ‘masculine’ might mean in the context of trans-masculinities); a character whose transgendered origin does not lie in any dubious notion of supernatural possession, psychological damage, dodgy genes or divine punishment, but is both ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. Most importantly, it does not require any modern medical diagnosis. I shall come out here and say that although I absolutely believe the individual’s right to determine herm own body should extend to accessing hormonal and surgical interventions if s/he desires them, such interventions should never be considered mandatory. Moreover, the ability to access them (financial considerations aside) should never rely upon a spurious diagnosis of mental illness. By consciously placing Mary Anne/Paul in the eighteenth century, before the advent of hormone therapy, sex reconstruction surgery, Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Harry Benjamin I am putting herm into a situation where herm gender identity is herm own business and it is up to herm to assert it. Paul does not wait to be told that he – from  this point in the novel I think it is correct to say ‘he’ and him as his gender identity is no longer in doubt – meets the criteria for gender dysphoria[xx] before feeling confident enough to assert himself as male, because the concept of gender dysphoria does not exist in his culture. Standing in front of his reflection in the window, Paul instinctively knows, just as Viola knows in Twelfth Night, what he is. Moreover, he expects, even demands, that once he has successfully exchanged the clothing that marks his gender as female for male attire and named himself  ‘Paul Smith’, society will accept his knowledge of his own gender without demanding that he undergo some form of gender surgery. Not for Paul the stress of ‘achieving’ a psychiatric diagnosis that will mark him as mentally ill for the remainder of his life, (but will permit him to be prescribed testosterone and to approach a surgeon); not for him years of saving for invasive and medically unnecessary surgery, which he may only want because society refuses to accept him as properly male without it. Not for him months of uncertainty before the powers that be will agree to award him the precious paperwork that proves him to be exactly what he knows he is. Neither must he suffer the fear of being thought improperly trans, or of being considered ‘not real’ because he is non-operative. No, for Paul, trans in the eighteenth century, where the clothes quite literally make the man, the situation is simple. As long as he successfully maintains a male social identity and does not get caught, he will be accepted as a man.

This is of course a different definition of gender truth than we, as modern people, are used to; for us, at least outside of queer circles, conceptions of gender are almost wholly centred upon and defined by the physical body that lies underneath the clothes. But although contemporary eighteenth century constructions of gender were assumed to have their natural origin in the body, that body, male or female, was not a public document in the way a modern body is. People rarely fully undressed, even – as can be seen both in the pornography and medical journals of the period – for sexual intercourse or to undergo examination by a physician[xxi].This rejection of the naked body, in combination with the constraints placed upon the bodies of both sexes by the restrictive design of the era’s clothing, meant that clothed actions and postures were more significantly gendered than they are today. The out-thrust male chest, characteristic of portraiture of the period, and often interpreted as a sign of manliness, resulted from the shoulders-back design of the typical frock coat (intended to ensure that the wearer could not slouch)[xxii]. For women, the restriction of arm, spine and pelvic movement that comes from wearing tightly laced stayes (which can also reduce breathing efficiency) was read as an indication of femininity[xxiii]. I can attest from experience of wearing both costumes to the fact that this simple change in clothing effects a powerful alteration in bodily movement over and above that encoded by personal habit, which is likely to have eased the transition from one gender performance to another and made passing easier. And most significantly, from the point of view of a passing transman such as Paul, young men entered the workforce and the adult male world at or before the point of puberty. Beardless men were common, as were men with high voices and low muscle mass.

The term ‘passing’ has its origin in early 20th century USA, where it was possible for a black person with a sufficiently light skin to ‘pass’ as white, thereby avoiding racial prejudice but setting him or herself up for trouble should the fact that they were ‘passing’ be discovered. The term’s first significant appearance in literature was by the American author Nella Larsen, in her 1929 novel of that title. In the modern transgender context it has come to mean a transperson’s early efforts to ‘pass’ as a member of the gender with which they identify. Because of the term’s historic associations with subterfuge and the falsification rather than revelation of identity, I find this usage problematic.

To say that this emphasis upon clothing made passing easier is not, of course, to suggest that the eighteenth century was a tolerant era for gender transgressors – as previously stated, if caught and exposed as ‘women’, passing transmen could suffer punishments ranging from incarceration to violent humiliation in the public stocks. Nevertheless, it remains to be said that despite the brutal and quixotic nature of what passed for justice in the eighteenth century, if the worst happened and Paul Smith’s subterfuge had been uncovered, he certainly would not have faced a worse fate than that which met the 238 trans people murdered worldwide in 2013 alone.[xxiv]

In addition to my desire to write a positive transgender narrative, I have decided that the majority of Paul’s story – which is one of three making up the whole novel – will be about issues other than his own gender. Paul Smith is not to be yet another gender non-conforming character whose raison d’etre is to explore the discomfort and awkwardness that can go along with changing one’s gender status. His transformation empowers him, but once he is able to live in the psychologically correct gender, his focus quickly shifts to matters in the world beyond himself, and from the point at which he arrives upon the island of Grenada to the point at which his gender is questioned by Arabella Pitfour (a discovery which has no catastrophic consequences for Paul, though they are unfortunate for Arabella) his gender does not constitute the most important part of his internal narrative or role within the larger plot. At no point do I use Paul’s gender, per se, as a pivotal narrative device or metaphor upon which the action, purpose or meaning of the novel is to hang. The reason Paul is a trans man is simply that he is a trans man – there is no need for the overall novel to proclaim any cause of his non conformity. But because it would be naive to suppose that the characters themselves will not ask questions of what is, after all, a rare event, Paul himself does come to wonder whether it is something he was born with (nature) or something he learned from his father (nurture) while Cordelia constructs his situation in spiritual terms as that of a male soul inhabiting the body of a female. Edmund rejects out of hand the possibility of Paul’s being anything but a biological male, while Arabella, who has considerable wit but no empathy or emotional maturity, insists that Paul is simply a woman, and perceives his transgender status as a threat to her own power. None of these positions, I hope, will ever be taken by my reader as solely representing the authorial truth – though it is fair to say that I have set up Arabella’s as a foil to it. Paul’s success or failure within the action of the novel is dependent, as it is for my other point of view characters, on his choices rather than his gender identity. Being a trans man neither dooms nor saves him; it is intended as a simple fact of his nature, and is no more prophetic in narrative terms than his ginger hair. The lives of trans people both in reality and in the novel must be about more than their gender.

If gender is understood as a social construct, and discomfort with one’s allotted gender identity interpreted primarily as a social, rather than a medical, problem, then part of the remedy for that discomfort can presumably be found within an appropriation or colonisation of the linguistic structures that create and maintain gender in the first place. Although it may initially seem that the meanings of words and the gender associations within language are resistant to any deliberate attempt to influence their evolution, the ease and swiftness with which words like “queer” and ‘gay’ have been adopted and reclaimed by the homosexual community to signify something very different from their original meanings proves that this is not so[xxv]. Nevertheless, there are some words: ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, which would seem resistant to any attempt to make them re-signify within a trans context. There has been an effort to adapt the word ‘boy’ in certain sections of the lesbian community to signify a certain type of lesbian, but here it is often spelled ‘boi’ – engendering a new word rather than extending the gendered meaning of a pre-existing one.  It is here, in this attempt to rework the meanings of words themselves, that I have found the flexibility of Paul’s Somerset dialect to come into its own. Dialect, by definition, deviates from the rules of standard grammar, and in its refusal to accept that which is prescribed (a very trans virtue, if there is yet such a thing) it is capable of reconfiguring the concepts conveyed within ordinary sentences into new, surprising, and illuminating forms. Dialect nouns can fluidly become verbs, and by so doing reveal previously hidden processes within language. So when Mary Anne/Paul says that “perhaps all that working in the forge had boyed I somehow”[xxvi] I intend there to be more at work within the statement than simple ignorance on herm part or playfulness on mine. I am trying to change what the language does.

The use of gender nouns as verbs has a precedent – many male raised and socialised people will be unhappily familiar with the colloquial demand to “man up!” and all the stereotypically masculine associations that the phrase conveys. The noun employed as verb is a command as well as a description of what is expected, and the hearer can be in no doubt that failure to comply is no less than a failure of masculinity, and therefore, to an extent, of self. Judith Butler, describing this mechanism in the context of how gender is created in children and perpetuated in later adult life, suggests that even when a gender noun is simply used syntactically as such, it has an interpellative power[xxvii] that creates the thing it names. So, regardless of the resistance encountered within Mary Anne’s own peculiar psyche, when ‘the Parents’ say to Mary Anne, “you’m a girl” or use the expression “my girl” then the word ‘girl’ expressed thus is instructing herm not merely in how to behave, but in how to identify. ‘Girl’ is what the word should cause herm psychologically to become. So if I, as Paul’s creator, which places me largely in the role of arbiter of truth in relation to my literary creation, assert: “Paul is a boy”, then my intention is to “boy” Paul, within the mind of my reader, and create Paul, within the novel, as a boy, according to a particular idea of masculinity. A similar effect ensues when Paul himself makes the statement: “I be a boy.” Because Paul is a trans boy, then the atemporal equivalence inherent in the infinitive form of the verb to ‘be’ subtly alters the word ‘boy’ to signify a masculinity that does not depend, at any given moment, upon having a penis or upon the performance of stereotypical male behaviours. “Boy” comes to be a term that is reliant for its justification and meaning upon Paul, as he, in his position of first person narrator, comes to represent the standard against which ‘boy’ should be judged. Trans masculinity becomes an acceptable standard of masculinity itself and the framework and terms by which gender is called into existence within Rainbow shift significantly. For this gambit to be in any way successful relies upon the reader’s acceptance of Paul as a reliable narrator, which places the daunting constraint upon myself as novelist that I must take great care to construct him as such.

The journey towards developing a specifically trans voice does not reside purely in the attempt to shift the meanings of specific words within, and potentially without a transgender context. The tone and register of what may become identifiable as a trans voice is important too. As I write there is no clearly identifiably transgender style of writing, although it may be that as it evolves and trans voices become more confident, the writing will appear across all genres of fiction and will be characterised by features it is currently developing. Among these features are an iconoclastic, queer, postmodern willingness to experiment with form and structure, to ignore any unnecessarily limiting constraints imposed by genre and to explore the possibilities of outlaw narratives. Another feature is a playful, taboo busting desire to talk frankly about challenging topics such as the physicality of the body; gender transition; prejudice; racial and class perspectives upon gender; queer sexualities and (despite the risk, especially acute for trans women, that discussing the subject will lead to a refusal of treatment by the medical establishment) BDSM sexual experiences.[xxviii] Certainly, all these features have been identified in my own work. Whatever the future holds, however, the majority of transgender writers  – or at least, writers who choose to discuss transgender experience – are currently memoirists, writers of short, often erotic, trans-fiction or gender theorists rather than long-form narrative fiction writers.

And this brings me back to my opening point; that as an openly transgender man creating through the medium of words the character of another transgender man, I am placed in a peculiar,  problematic, situation. As a trans man, I have a first-hand experience of my subject that a cisgender man or a woman does not, but I feel that I am, perversely, also handicapped by the fact that I am writing within, and for, a cisgenderist culture that has historically tended to silence trans voices and to prefer cisgender medical, theoretical or fictional understandings of trans people’s lives over the testimonies of trans people themselves[xxix]. Many more people, both cisgender and trans, will have read Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning depiction of an intersex person or Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country than, for instance, the work of Del Grace Volcano or Leslie Feinburg. Simply by the virtue of my own transgender identity, the reliability of my narrative testimony can become suspect. For me to state, for instance, that cisgenderist prejudice exists may be taken as an indication of oversensitivity and bias upon my part – a bizarre situation which has a parallel in the denial often faced by black or feminist activists when they try to talk about their  experiences in popular, particularly online, culture.  Additionally, in my case, I am particularly vulnerable to the charge that because I also experience occasions of identification with a female sense of gender, I am not ‘really’ transgender at all, but merely confused. (To which I must reply that though I may be confused about any number of things, my gender is never one of them.) All this leaves me, as a novelist, in the strange position of having not only to construct Paul Smith as a reliable narrator, but also Jack Wolf. For me, every bit as much as for Carol Hanisch, the personal is inherently political. Whether I, as a publicly out, gender-fluid trans man, load the washing machine or make the tea, whether I am financially self-supporting, whether I am in a romantic relationship or not (and if I am, with whom), whether I wear trousers or pink fluffy slippers is political. The fact that I write, and choose to write, upon trans-masculinities within the established genre of historical fiction, thereby calling attention to my own transgender status and the historical existence of trans people, is my most political act of all.

References

[i] The phrase is drawn from the title of Hanisch’s essay, “The Personal is Political” in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (ed. Firestone and Koedt,1970.) It became an important feminist rallying cry in the 60s and 70s.

[ii] “Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.”Ingrid Bengis, “Man Hating” in Combat in the Erogenous Zone, (Harper Perennial, 1972) p54.

[iii] See Kennedy, Natacha: “Cultural Cisgenderism: Consequences of the Imperceptible” – Keynote address, POWS annual conference, 2012. Available on Academia. Edu

[iv] de Beauvoir, Simone:  The Works of Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Z EL Bey, 2011. Original printing 1949) : ” ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam…… Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’  p6

[v] See: Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1992) and Bodies that Matter, on the Discursive limits of Sex (Routledge, 1993)

[vi] See: Elworthy, Frederick Thomas: An Outline of the Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset (English Dialect Society, 1877, reprinted Bibliobazaar, 2012) p33

[vii] Halberstam, Judith, “The Androgyne, The Tribade, the Female Husband” in Female Masculinity  (Duke U.P. 1998) p72. See aso for example Wheelwright, Julie, Amazons and Military Maids, (Pandora Press, 1989) who in her discussion of the likely transsexual James Barry refers to him throughout as female. p166.

[viii] http://www.riabrodell.com/_/Current_Work/Entries 2011/9/9_James_How_aka_Mary_East_%26_Mrs._How.html          http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1766east.htm

See also: Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women (HarperCollins, 1993) pp70-73

[ix] Fielding’s Female Husband, (1748) https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fielding/henry/female-husband/ is the sensationalist retelling of a real life court case which was first reported in Bodley’s Bath Journal on 22 Sept 1746. See also: Donoghue, op cit pp73-80

[x] http://www.riabrodell.com/_/Current_Work/Entries/2011/9/7_Ann_Marrow.html

See: Boe and Corkyndale (eds) Heteronormativity in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture (Ashgate, 2014) p182

[xi] Charke, Charlotte A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke, youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, Esq, written by herself (1755)  https://archive.org/stream/ANarrativeOfTheLifeOfMrs.CharlotteCharkeYoungestDaughterOfColley/A_narrative_of_the_life_of_Mrs_Charlotte_Charke_djvu.txt

[xii] John Radclyffe Hall to Evgenia Souline, August 17th 1934, in Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, ed. Joanne Glasgow, 49-52. Hall’s description of herself as a ‘congenital invert’ reveals the influence of the sexological theories of Havelock Ellis.

[xiii] ‘Tremendous’ progress in the context of there having previously been no progress at all. Paris Lees (UK journalist and transwoman) has appeared several times on Question Time, BBC TV, between October 31, 2013 and the present day. Sophia Burset (fictional character in Orange is the New Black,) was named in December as one of the top 5 most important fictional characters of 2013. On Oct 9, 2015, it was announced that a transmale actor, Riley Carter Millington, would be joining the cast of Eastenders to play a young transgender man. Also in 2015 Rebecca Root and Bethany Black (both transwomen) have had regular roles in the sitcom Boy Meets Girl and the LGBT dramas Cucumber and Banana. Both roles were of transwomen. Root has also previously played cisgender female roles.

[xiv] As one reader puts it: “At the moment I’m seriously pissed off at the young adult fantasy writer Maria V. Snyder, who came so close to creating a truly awesome FTM trans character in her “Study” series, only to mess it all up in the sequels. She says she originally conceived the character simply as a man who fulfils a certain role; the idea that he has a female body came to her later. Unfortunately, ordinary trans people aren’t allowed in her universe, so she had to tack on a stupid and contrived “possessed by someone else’s soul” retcon. I have never literally thrown a book across the room, but this time I came VERY close.” http://skepchick.org/2012/01/13-myths-and-misconceptions-about-trans-women-part-one/ Comments:ParanoidAndroid.

[xv] Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, (Fourth Estate, 2002)

[xvi] Eugenides, Readers Book Club, The Guardian, Friday 2 December 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/02/jeffrey-eugenides-middlesex-book-club

James Gibbons, Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, The Paris Review 2013 “The Art of Fiction” No. 215  http://bombmagazine.org/article/2519/jeffrey-eugenides

[xvii]  Gibbons, ibid.

[xviii] Halberstam, Judith, “A Writer of Misfits: John Radclyffe Hall and the Discourse of Inversion” in Female Masculinity, (Duke University Press, 1998) p87

[xix] See: Faderman, Lilian Surpassing the Love of Men pp322-333. See also Skinner, Shelly, “The House in Order” Lesbian Identity and The Well of Loneliness ( Womens’ Studies 23, 1994) pp19-33.

[xx] Transgender people, according the the DSMV in the USA and NHS guidelines in the UK, are currently to be diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’. This diagnosis, which replaces the older ‘transsexuality’, still stigmatises gender identity as an illness and consequently places the keys to gender transition in the hands of – typically cisgender – medical professionals rather than those of the individual concerned. Many modern countries will not allow a transgender individual to live legally in their identified gender unless they have undergone some form of medical gender reassignment. In the most extreme cases (where transition is possible at all) sterilisation and surgery is demanded. In 2013 the UN condemned this requirement as an abuse of human rights and, thankfully, some countries are now abandoning it.

A list of the criteria according to which gender dysphoria may currently be diagnosed can be found here: http://www.news-medical.net/health/Diagnosis-of-Gender-Dysphoria.aspx

[xxi] A representative series of plates of 18th Century pornography showing bodies at least partially clothed can be found in: Gatrell, Vic: City of Laughter, Sex and Satire in 18th Century London (Walker, 2007)

See also: Peakman, Julie, Mighty Lewd Books (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) Lascivious Bodies (Atlantic, 2005) for further discussion of 18th Century pornography. For discussion of 18th Century diagnostic practises see: Porter, Roy, “The Enlightenment” in The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (HarperCollins, 1997) pp256-58

[xxii] See for example: http://frenchculture.org/visual-and-performing-arts/interviews/interview-denis-bruna-curator-fashion-and-fabrics-french

and also:  http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter12/deportment.cfm

[xxiii] Examples of both men and womens’ fashions can be found in the V&A museum http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/0-9/18th-century-fashion/

[xxiv] Statistic from: Transgender murder project, part of Transgender Europe, www.tgeu.org

[xxv] ‘Gay’, which had the primary historic meaning of ‘carefree’ has been resignified almost by accident. The word ‘gay’ meaning homosexual, came to us via its previous additional meanings of “addicted to social pleasures’ and ‘rakish man’ via both twentieth century homosexual slang and the the 1960s back formed acronym ‘G.A.Y.’ which stood for “good as you”. This ‘backronym’ is now often assumed to be the origin of the modern term.  www.oed.com/view/Entry/77207

[xxvi] Wolf, Jack, Rainbow, unpublished PhD novel. 2014 p39

[xxvii] Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter, (Routledge, 1993) p82, p171

[xxviii] See for example: Bornstein, Kate Gender Outlaw (Routledge, 1994); Taste This Collective, Boys Like Her (Raincoast Books, 2002); Valerio, Max Wolf The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006); Krieger, Nick Nina Here nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender (Beacon Press, 2011)

[xxix] For instance, after Caitlin Jenner’s transition, the New York Times carried five op-ed pieces by cisgender women, and not one by a transwoman. This was not for want of submissions: see https://medium.com/gender-2-0/i-m-a-trans-woman-here-s-my-rejected-new-york-times-op-ed-on-caitlyn-jenner-305fef19cbc4

Jack Wolf is a writer and academic. His previous works include “The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones” (Chatto and Windus, 2013), which won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award 2104, and his Phd thesis “Rainbow / Literary Transgressions: Re-constructing a Transgender Character in a Historical Novel” (BSU, 2016). His work focuses on sites of identity and transformation, and he is fascinated by the intersections between performance and identity, and between word, meaning and sound. He is currently working on a multi-modal, multi-platform project aimed at exploring what it means to be human in the anthropocene, and how the knowledge of potential anthropogenic environmental collapse may alter how modern, western humans may need to change in order to survive into the next century.
Prior to becoming a writer, Jack trained as an actor and performed as a folk singer. He lives in Bath where he currently lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. He blogs at jackwolfauthor.wordpress.com.

…Your chance to test the Write Track 5 day challenge

At Write Track we use persuasive technology to encourage writers to write more regularly – and become more productive. Something we’ve written about before for this website.

Today, we’re inviting Writing Platform readers to test out our new free 5-day writing kickstart – a writing challenge we’ve designed around the principles of behaviour change and the science of habit-forming products.

The product’s at a very early stage – so advance apologies for any small bugs you might meet along the way – but we really hope that it help writers get off the starting blocks and write. So how does it work?

First off, we don’t tell you what to write – that’s up to you – but we will give you the support, motivation and structure to continue.

We ask you to tell us your writing goal for the week and then set a first step towards meeting that goal – there are five steps in total.

We give you a 24-hour deadline to ‘track’ and tell us your progress on each step –and every time you track, we email you with a new ‘secret’ of writing productivity – all backed by behaviour change science.

Because we know that writing consecutively every day is tough, we give you two writing ‘lives’ to use – or two days off. However, if you use both your lives, you’re off the challenge. Sorry, no excuses!

We’ve already run the challenge as an email MVP with 40 participants so we know that the challenge works – when writers stick with it. We’ve seen people finish projects, submit short stories and grow in confidence – over just five days.

If you’re interested in taking part, find out more here or just send Chris an email at beprolifiko@gmail.com and we’ll add you to the wait list.