abstract
In Jackie Kay's award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf's version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay's novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss's African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Notes
Kay's ambition for her novel, that its constituent voices would be a narrative version of jazz, echoes Marie Cardinal in The Words To Say It, cited in Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: ‘My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and contain within itself the essence of the whole.’ (Morrison, 1992: vi).
In referring to Joss as transgendered, I am working with Jay Prosser's account of that term: the transgenderist crosses the lines of gender but not of sex, and the transgendered subject's commitment to living as either a man or a woman is ‘more substantial than that denoted by ‘transvestite’ or ‘cross-dresser.’’ Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York: Columbia University Press: 176.
A conservative sample takes us from George Moore's The Secret Life of Albert Nobbs in which the head servant of a Dublin hotel is, on his death bed, revealed to be a woman; Woolf's cross-dressing transsexual psycho-biography Orlando (1928); Radclyffe Hall's study of tortured and martyred inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928); Djuna Barnes's gothic sub-culture of transvestism in Nightwood (1936); Ursula LeGuin's feminist-utopian The Left Hand of Darkness; Gore Vidal's warring and satirical Myra and Myron in Myra Breckinridge; Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jaye Davidson's portrayal of Dil in The Crying Game (1992); Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1994); Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry (1999); Dinitia Smith's The Illusionist (1998) and Boys Don't Cry, the film account (released in 2000), both based on the true story of Brandon Teena, murdered for passing as a man.
The fetish comes to compensate for a moment of disavowal for the male child when he first sees that his mother's genitals are not the same as his own. The fetish thus wards off the threat of castration since it acts as a substitute for the missing or castrated organ: ‘the fetish is almost always linked metonymically, rather than strictly metaphorically, to the female genitalia: it is not necessarily a conventional phallic object, but a part of the body (the foot) or an inanimate object (underclothes) continguous to the female genitals ... in the fetish what is preserved is the fantasy of a hidden maternal penis, an imaginary phallus that is the source of the so-called phallic mother's omnipotence.’ (Elizabeth Wright, 1992: 114).
There are a few dates given in the novel: Millie takes Joss to Torr in mid-winter 1956. They are married on October 28 1955 when Joss is 30, Millie 20. Although this would make Joss's birth 1925, his discography gives his dates as 1927–1997, which is confirmed by Edith Moore, who says that Josephine will have just turned 70. Millie is 60 and Colman, born in 1961, 36 at the narrative's present moment.
Not being the ‘real thing’ is also Stephen Gordon's anxiety in Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel of sexual inversion, The Well of Loneliness.
See, for example, Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo, in which he regards the bi-sexed hermaphrodite in terms of the pre-Oedipal boy's fantasy of his mother as possessing both breasts and a penis.
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Hargreaves, T. The power of the ordinary subversive in Jackie Kay's Trumpet. Fem Rev 74, 2–16 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400068
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400068