October 18, 2016 - 23:06
I really enjoyed working with my group today--and also wished I had been in class for the conversation about Dill (which I think happened the Thursday before break).
Dill's story really disrupts Western, white, middle/upper-class expectations around "coming out," to which I think labels and identities are attached. Dill doesn't vocally (or in Dill's narrator voice) claim any particular identities (hence our indecision about how to gender Dill and even refer to what issues are coming up in the narrative...queerness? a trans identity?)--however, everyone is aware of Dill's presentation vs. anatomy (thanks to Willa Mae) and understands that Dill and Willa Mae had a romantic entanglement. Though a number of voices in the book, as well as others in the community, refer to Dill using derogatory language, it's employed almost lazily, off-handedly, and it's clear that most characters have a deep respect for Dill's more prominent characteristics (trustworthiness, physical strength, etc). While Dill's community of friends and family would not likely be named "LGBTQ friendly," and while they seem to feel uncomfortable around direct mention of Dill and Willa Mae's relationship, Dill still experiences an unspoken acceptance because Dill is seen as a person not defined by identities that might evoke hateful responses.
This reminds me of a passage from Clare's book Exile and Pride:
"Queer people--using the narrow definition--don't live in Port Orford, or at least I have never found them [. . .] Now if I moved back and lived quietly, never saying the word dyke but living a woman-centered life, no one would shoot at my house, throw stones through my windshield, or run me out of town. [. . .] Urban, middle-class queer activists may mock this balance as simply another 'don't ask, don't tell' situation contributing to queer invisibility. While I agree that it isn't the idea relationship between queer people and straight people, it is far better than the polite and disdainful invisibility bestowed on us by many middle-class, liberal heterosexuals. [. . .] I am quite sure my aunt has never introduced Barb [her lover] to Uncle John or Aunt Esther, Uncle Henry or Aunt Lillian as her partner, lover, or girlfriend. Yet Barb is unquestionably family, sitting with my grandfather's immediate relatives near the coffin, openly comforting his aunt" (Clare 32-33).
And in Dill's experience, living a life without need for (and perhaps, as Clare offers, with a need to avoid) labels, we find trouble finding pronouns, labels, even facets of identity to name (sexuality? gender?). This language conundrum is reminding me of a passage by Ellsworth that I keep returning to this semester. She writes about the insufficiency of language to express a person's truth, despite our best efforts:
“It is impossible to say everything, once and of all, in language. Any attempt to say who ‘I am’—to make my language become fully identical with itself and with myself—brings me up against the limits of language, up against the impossibility of language coinciding with what it speaks of, up against the gap between what is spoken and what is referred to, up against language’s inevitable misfire” (Ellsworth 44).
Acknowledging that Dill does not lay claim to any identities (the most direct suggestion we get of one of Dill's identities is Dill's joy upon hearing "Mr. Dill Smiles") may be inconvenient for our own discussion of the text, but seems to gesture to both Ellsworth's notion of "language's inevitable misfire," and our conflict in class today around addressing intersectionality. We can express the experience of intertwined identities all we want, but our language is limited in that we must name those identities individually, if only as individual words, or words combined with hyphens, still separate entities forced together by sentence structure. It certainly does not seem possible for Dill to be "out" (whatever this would mean) in the community, but the lack of identities put into language offers up opportunity for a true acknowledgement of Dill's complex personhood to take place--one that is not constrained by a laundry list of identities.
And still--I think, for our purposes, it is really important to discuss what identity-based dynamics are playing out in the narrative around Dill's character, and this process will rely on our limited language...