Queer Eyes: Cross-Gendering, Cross-Dressing, and Cross-Racing Miss Amelia

Abstract

Matsui discusses how The Ballad of the Sad Café depicts a white woman’s resistance to white male dominance by being queer and penetrates the meaning of queerness in the novella. Matsui reconsiders the story’s ending, which many critics have interpreted as showing male force reinforcing a woman’s oppression, and argues that Miss Amelia’s queer way of being actually has a subversive function. Where racial, gender, and sexual categories are strictly policed by the dominant white male gaze, she crosses boundaries “diagonally.” This is opposed to a “straight” way, which means exchanging opposites, such as man for woman, or privileged for unprivileged, only to produce another form of repression. Matsui concludes that Miss Amelia’s queerness shows the possibility of alternative subjectivity beyond any boundaries or categories.