Trigger warning: sexual assault

In Neil Gaiman’s The Doll House, women are cats. Women are a lot of things in this graphic novel: protagonists, foils, stupid, smart, slut-shamed, and presented as tropes. Amongst the same old nonsense, though, Gaiman uses metonymy to describe women, while I, reading the book, was also using something to symbolize something about myself, also a woman.

Throughout The Doll House, Gaiman has a lot of people “playing” with women. The book is scattered with references to women as things that someone can play with; toying with them like playing with a cat. The women are props in his book to play out a larger story, and within the big, sweeping narrative of dreaming and waking, the women are played with even more. They are made into sex objects to be manipulated with like they are as inhuman as cats (pausing only to make the connection between “pussies” and “cats”). When serial killers in Part V of the novel meet and talk about their experiences, one goes on about starting off with “pussies” and cutting off their heads—a description that could easily reference cats or vulvas.

Gaiman draws on symbolism to make his novel more detailed on the micro-level. It fleshes out dialogue and character interaction with a running pun that references patriarchal oppression and modern day conflict. Gaiman, the author, uses symbolism in his writing. I, a student, signal sometimes explicit details about myself.

Is a Christian feminist an oxymoron? I identify as a Christian. I identify as a feminist. I do not know how to completely reconcile them together. It can be easier to have these two aspects be separate. In some circles you can proudly say you are a feminist and in others affirm that you are a Christian. But then you are denying a big part of yourself if you do not acknowledge both beliefs. An issue that you’re creating for yourself is that you are hiding and choosing parts of yourself which might not be as accepted in certain circles. You are picking one over the other and in those instances saying that the other is less important. How do you deal with feminists who have a view that religion and “their ideologies, their symbolism, and above all, their established institutions stand accused of putting a stranglehold on women’s aspirations”(Soskice 1) In many ways men and organizations have used religion to put women in a subservient role. Christianity is not about making women lesser than men and feminism is not about destroying family values and beliefs that Christians hold dear. If you can find the good in theology that helps to elevate women then Christianity and feminism could become closer to being accepted together.

We all read Kathy Acker’s essay “Seeing Gender”, which breaks down the essence of meaning (especially of gender) by questioning the process of mimesis in patriarchal language. In it she searches Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass for gender – but finds “only the reiterations, the mimesis of patriarchy, or my inability to be.” After reading it, I wondered – did she expect anything but a reflection, looking into a mirror? Carroll’s novel is a good example text to display the problems with patriarchal representations of gender, but I wondered if there was a text that addressed and/or transcended these problems.

Then we read Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel The Doll’s House, which offers a different way to look at gender – rather than in a mirror, through a dream. The Dream House, Morpheus’s realm, is a place of possibilities as infinite as our imaginations unlimited by social rules – some darker than we might expect. Gaiman’s dreams help us to see our psyche in a way that offers new insight on our anxiety about the roles in which we find ourselves in the waking world. They portray a self separate from social expectations of gender: a body, as Acker describes it.

“I am an archaeology major and finding pottery sherds are very common.  As an archaeologist it is my job to create a complete picture, a complete identity for the sherds I find.  Right now I’m struggling to find my true self, my authentic identity.  Right now I am a bunch of sherds waiting to be found and be put together.”

Identity Fluid or Not

            The class is averagely sized, large by Bryn Mawr’s standards though. The atmosphere is a bit chaotic, I walk in to a whirlwind of questions and answers and voices a few minutes after the “getting to know you” activity has started. The professor says list every pronoun you know to this person across from you that you’ve never spoken to…go.

On the surface, Arizona’s ground is purely gravel, beneath is sticky clay and rock-hard white lime. It’s a cruel combination yielding to only the toughest and most determined, and even those somehow able to sink a root must fight for their lives under blistering sun and cloudless sky. Trying to forge a home in the desert can lead to exhaustion and hopelessness, so I readily admit to a certain degree of masochism behind my love for a place that seems, on its surface, to be the antithesis of life and nurture. Growing up in Arizona, I learned to crave the searing burn of sun on my skin, the way my nostrils stung with deep breaths of the dusty, desiccated air, but I didn’t want to belong. I watched my neighbors’ futile attempts to maintain even the sparsest of green lawn, only to become despondent as they turned to hay despite the wasted and wasteful gallons of precious water streaming from their hoses. My love for the Sonoran Desert was hardly immediate; for many years I viewed the barren landscape as a personification of my own inner despondency. I yearned to leave – rejecting the land was infinitely easier that trying to put down roots. When I did leave, however, I felt the ache of displacement immediately. I had unwittingly sunk root into ground that had once seemed impenetrable and I have discovered that beneath the rocks and clay laid a varied and complex soil that has managed, despite my protestations, to feed a soul I never acknowledged.

If a feminist work falls in the forest and nobody can understand it, can it still be called feminist?

“Girl, boy, boy, boy, girl, girl, boy, girl,” I quickly say to myself.

On the second page of Persepolis, there is a panel reading, “where boys and girls were together,” and the illustration shows eight children (Satrapi, 4). When I read that page, I stared at the drawing trying to figure out how I knew which children were boys and which were girls. I could tell, from a simplistic drawing, based on the hairstyles and the top half of the shirts, and that bothered me. The style of the drawings and the accessibility of Persepolis reminded me of illustrated children’s books: simple sentences with drawings of what is happening.

 I decided to take another look at a few children’s books I loved when I was younger. Many children’s books feature anthropomorphic characters, and I wondered how the anthropomorphic characters would be gendered compared to the human characters. The specific stories I looked at were “The Veil” from Persepolis, “Chapter VII In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet Has a Bath” from Winnie-the-Pooh, The Berenstain Bears and the Sitter, Arthur Writes a Story, Clifford’s Family, and Thank you, Amelia Bedelia. The illustrations in these stories range from very humanized to actually human, and from highly gendered to barely.

No one has ever really understood why I have a tendency to be so quiet in class.  I still don’t think that I know the logic behind it.  Nonetheless, I’ve sat through countless parent/teacher conferences where my high school teachers said, “Your daughter is just so bright but she never speaks up in class” and “she’s such a shy students.”  I watched as my parent’s eyes widened in complete confusion.  There was no way these teachers could have been talking about their daughter; their 5”4’ ball of energy, who never seems to stop talking.  This is the part of me that has never made sense.  Why is it that the second I step into a classroom, my thoughts freeze and my voice immediately vanishes, leaving me empty in my chair as I listen to everyone else’s lively discussion.  But take that chair out of the classroom and put it on a theater stage.  Give me a script or lyrics to sing.  Standing on a stage, prepared to act, sing or dance, is more freeing for me than any liberal arts college classroom has been so far.  These dichotomous aspects of my personality are at war with each other, searching for a compromise between the girl whose heart bleeds on stage and fearfully shrinks in the classroom.  I want to learn represent myself knowing that there is a shy student and an exuberant performer inside of me and hopefully find a compromise between classroom expectations and my own. 

This is a new username. It's still someone who's in the class, but it's not attached to a lot of very identifiable information (as opposed to my old one). Anne and I agreed that writing about my (maybe) queerness would be a more interesting topic than the one I initially proposed, but it's a little more clandestine than a literary analysis of The Dollhouse. I'm just starting to come out at Bryn Mawr, and people back home don't know I'm queer yet--I really don't want my grandmother to find out about this because someone in the family thinks it would be fun to teach her how to use Google, so broadcasting my name no longer seemed like such a good idea.