‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’: Liminality in George Saunders’ My Amendment
Abstract
Gender is often considered to be in trouble amid the continuing intolerance to differences in society. George Saunders’ ‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’ is a satirical mock on homophobia that hinders the freedom of homo-sexual people. In the light of several protests and debates, same-sex marriage is accepted legally in certain countries as a revival from the traditional and conventional chains of the society. This interdisciplinary research examines liminality in the fictional writing of George Saunders’ “My Amendment” where the character named Ken proposes a fictional scale called ‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’ to determine the manly and feminine nature in a person. Considering the perspective of Saunders’ fictional character, the paper categorizes the liminal existence of men and women in the context of Samish-sex marriages. For the interpretative analysis, Victor Turner’s anthropological insights on Liminality are applied that opens discussion to the ‘in-between-ness’ and ‘neither here nor there’ or both conditions in a person. Also, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) test introduced by Sandra L. Bem is compared to analyze the details in the text through the perspective of a more scientific attempt. From the analysis of both scales, it was found that there isn’t a perfect manly and womanly character for a person, but only a liminal existence. The insights of the research would help to understand the liminal characteristics of gender performed by human beings.
Keywords: betwixt and between, liminal, liminality, gender, George Saunders, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, Victor Turner.
Introduction
Queer right is a hot topic in the twenty-first-century scenario where the world does a significant transition from its traditional and conventional forms of adamant social structures to adaptive and inclusive flexibility in dealing with sensitive odds and ends. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements are strong enough in different parts of the world against bi-phobia, homophobia and transphobia in the society. A recent statement by the Central government of India at the Delhi High Court reveals the taboo in a wider spectrum exhibited even by authorities who should have been open to the changes in the world. On 14th September 2020, the Centre informed the court their opposition to a petition seeking registration of same sex marriage under The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 “submitting that “our law, legal system, society, our values” do not recognize such unions” (Ahsan). From 1969 onwards such movements have shown their uncompromising presence in certain areas of Europe, North America, South America, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan etc. for their legal rights, acceptance, marriage equality and liberation. Such movements are a reflection of the continuous discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sexual characteristics. “A spate of violence against trans people has claimed the lives of at least 369 individuals between October 2017 and September 2018” (“LGBT Rights”). George Saunders writes about the issue of Same-sex marriage which is well connected with gay and lesbian issues. The character of Ken writes a letter to the editor as a response to an article that opposes same-sex marriage. The exaggerated tone of the fictional letter points to the satirical form of his writing. The “overt absurdity via hyperbole” (Hadaway 27) gives a hint that the ideology within the letter isn’t that of George Saunders.
This research paper explores the liminality profound in the satirical writing of Saunders where his fictional character Ken criticizes people having Same-sex marriage through his ‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’. The research methodologies used here is interpretative analysis and comparison. Saunders’ “My Amendment” is critically and interpretatively analyzed to identify the core idea of the work and its relevance in the contemporary world scenario. Moreover, Sandra L. Bem’s the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) test is compared with that of the fictional scale proposed by Saunders through his character “Ken Byron” as part of his criticism towards the exploitations and tortures towards the queer community and same-sex marriage in different parts of the world, especially in the American cultural context. Though there have been several notable researches based on selected works of Saunders, due to his less involvement in expressing opinions on gender-based issues, there aren’t many sources available to describe the various perspectives put forth by other scholars in the field.
Among the few notable scholarly works on Saunders’ “My Amendment”, the Master’s thesis by Thaddaeus Hadaway submitted at the University of Canterbury describes the satiric tone used by Saunders in deliberately inverting the real intention of the author for the sake of a humorous reading which gradually informs the reader the actual stand and ideological perspective of the author. Saunders’ stories engage in postmodern irony without affecting the moral agenda mixed with satiric wit and narrative empathy (Hadaway 4). In the same way of understanding other satiric pieces, this should not be considered similarly in its literal meaning. Rather, the hidden criticism by Saunders has to be traced to understand the intention behind writing such a humorous and exaggerated piece of work. At the beginning of the letter to Mr. Terence Rackman, Saunders gives hint to the sarcasm employed in the content by informing,
Like any sane person, I am against Same-Sex-Marriage, and in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban it...I feel that, in the interest of moral rigor, it is necessary for us to go a step further, which is why I would like to propose a supplementary constitutional amendment. (Saunders 73)
George Saunders is regarded as one of the most outstanding American short story writers who often shoots criticism with his satiric beauty of language. He has published four short story anthologies and a novel which received the Man Booker Prize in the year 2017. His writing career started from around 1989 when he uses to write for the leading magazines and newspapers in America such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GQ, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Witness and Quarterly West. Later, these short fictions were compiled to as anthologies. His collections are Civil-War-Land in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006) and Tenth of December (2013). He has also written fictions such as The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000), The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) and Fox 8 (2018). The Brain-dead Megaphone (2007) is his collection of sixteen essays. “My Amendment” was originally written in 2004 and was published in The New Yorker. He was well known for his different style of writing short stories that highlighted the importance of compassion and empathy towards each other. Lincoln in the Bardo’s experimental style of writing was highlighted by the award committee that gave him the Booker Prize.
Though at the beginning the reader gets confused about the orientation of the fictional work, it gets to receive clarity when he proposes the absurd Manly scale, self-improvement technique and the supplementary constitutional amendment. The writing can be considered as a response to President George W. Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage to protect the 'the most fundamental institution of civilization'' (Bumiller). On 25th February 2004, Bush’s announcement against gay marriage was a response to the moves of Massachusetts Court and San Francisco Mayor to permit same-sex marriage. Just after nine days from the news reports, Saunders published his response on this controversial topic on 5th March 2004 in The New Yorker. Though the writing was a reaction to the then-controversial political and social scenarios in America, the relevance of the work remains the same in most parts of the world, especially in India. Though freedom for same-sex marriage exists in many countries, there are continuous social disturbances to the anti-structural attitude of the like-minded same-sex people.
As the first example, he introduced a male friend ‘K’ with a ponytail married to a female ‘S’ who is tall, stocky and with a short hair. He finds mismatch in their marriage and suggests that ‘K’ might have desired to be married to a man. He then introduces a female friend ‘K’ with a deep booming voice who is married to ‘H’ with pretty masculine qualities. He then raises his argument that ‘H’ could have desired for a man by doubting on his “turned on” (Saunders 74) marital relationship with the deep booming male voice ‘K’. As a third example, he introduces ‘T’ with an extremely small penis who is married to a female ‘O’ who fixes cars. He finds a mismatch in their relationship and suggests that ‘O’ should have been married to a woman and ‘T’ to a man who works as a car mechanic. Ken writes his viewpoint that:
…when God made man and woman, He had something very specific in mind. It goes without saying that He did not want men marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want, in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women. (Saunders 75)
Ken proposes a scale to measure Manly and feminine nature in a person to identify the nearness of a marriage between a man and a woman to a Samish-sex marriage. He plots points from -10 to +10 to where -10 denote most feminine and +10 refers to most manly behaviour. He states that a man with 8 points and woman with -6 points will not come under the criteria of Samish-sex marriage as they have gained combined point more than 10 in total. His calculation is based on “the difference between the man’s rating and the woman’s rating – the Gender Differential” (Saunders 76).
To add to the satiric tone of the fictional writing, he includes a method of repair the existing defect in the marriage “…converting it from a Samish-Sex Marriage to a healthy Normal Marriage, by having the feminine man become more masculine and/or the masculine woman become more feminine” (Saunders 76). He calls it a classic American project of self-improvement and gives examples from his own life. He asks to follow his method in order to achieve a higher manly scale for the male members in such a situation. The extremity of the hate towards same-sex marriages is expressed by Ken by saying, “I, for one, am sick and tired of this creeping national tendency to let certain types of people take advantage of our national good nature by marrying individuals who are essentially of their own gender” (Saunders 79).
Though all those exaggerated ideas from the part of the fictional character Ken are framed to create a satirical tone to the fictional work by Saunders, this paper would like to explore the liminality in the scale introduced by Ken to measure the manly and feminine behaviour in people. Liminality, though derived in the anthropological contexts of rituals, in a general metaphoric aspect, is an in-between condition, of neither here nor there, betwixt and between where the participant has already separated from his previous state or world and has not yet entered the next state or world (Turner, The Forest of Symbols 48). It derives from the elaborate works conducted as part of the research done by the British anthropologist Victor Turner in the 1960s and 70s by being inspired from the tripartite structure of Arnold Van Gennep who proposed the three phases such as the pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal in his Les Rites de passage published in 1909. The book was translated to English by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee in 1960 in the title The Rites of Passage.
Turner elaborates the insights on liminality in his essay “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” published in the book The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual in 1967. They are symbolically considered either as sexless or bisexual (Turner 49) as they represent none or both the features. Turner also extends his insight on the situation by saying that if the liminal period is seen as an inter-structural phase in social dynamics, the symbolism both of androgyny and sexlessness immediately becomes intelligible in sociological terms without the need to import psychological explanations” (49). Liminality and the Modern express the viewpoint that,
Liminality is a universal concept: cultures and human lives cannot exist without moments of transition, and those brief and important spaces where we live through the in-between. Such transitions mark us, they stamp our personalities, and that is the way it will always be. (Thomassen 4)
Mary Douglas writes that order is maintained by ritualized avoidance of ambiguity and indiscretion. Liminality leads to a secular identity of expressing ambiguity and uncertainty with no status and property of its own (Turner, The Forest of Symbols 49). “The symbols exhibited express that the "liminal personae" are neither living nor dead, and both living and dead; they express the ambiguity of the inter-structural period” (Deflem 13). According to the existing norms of the society in which Ken writes his letter, the endpoint of -10 and +10 is considered as a perfect person with the most feminine and manly behaviour respectively. He considers the points nearer to the extreme ends as considerably good for a person to continue his/her existence or otherwise suggests rethinking to correct him/her. In the people given as examples by Ken, the point might fall nearer to the neutral point of zero as they have contrary qualities when compared to their gender. If we consider ‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’ as a basic measuring method, the people who have their point away from the extreme ends should have to be considered as not completely eligible to be called one or the other. They exist in-between the two extremes set by the traditional society represented by Ken. With exaggeration and absurd examples, Ken tried to prove his argument. For Ken, there exist only binaries in the case of gender i.e. woman at the one end of -10 and man at the other end of +10. While considering the sexless status of a “liminal personae” (Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure 49), “the undifferentiated character of liminality is reflected by the discontinuance of sexual relations and the absence of marked sexual polarity” (Turner 104). This state of living of a person is known to be as a threshold, which is also identified as limen (Turner, “Variations on a theme of Liminality” 37) in the theoretical perspective of Liminality.
Is there a complete man or a complete woman in this world? Can someone be awarded Ken’s -10 or +10 points? This can lead to an answer that might solve the complex equation behind the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender. As per the studies conducted by the American psychologist Sarndra L. Bem, there exist both masculine and feminine characteristics in an individual. Her androgyny theory states that an individual could express both feminine and masculine characteristics. She proposed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) test to measure an individual’s femininity and masculinity. BSRI is widely used in researches related to gender roles. As per the BSRI test, the rating scale is ranged from “Not at all desirable” to “Extremely desirable”. “Personality characteristics that were judged as more desirable for a man than for a woman or more desirable for a woman than for a man qualified for inclusion in the masculinity and femininity scales, respectively” (Davis).
Certain characteristics like aggressive, analytic, gullible, cheerful etc. were taken to analyze the scale in an individual. As a result, she categorized individuals as exclusively feminine or masculine as well as individuals with balanced levels of traits from both scales. They were named as androgynous. From the above said fictional and scientific explanations on gender scale, it is clear that every individual in the world has a certain amount of masculinity as well as a feminine character in him/her. It is the variation of certain behaviour or traits that decide the scale of a person. For some people, Ken’s scale may lead to 9 points or more and for some others, it might count only till 4 or below. Same is the case with the BSRI test. It is based on instrumentality and expressiveness which vary while considering the collective consciousness in an individual. “… gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 519). His view that gender is constructed is similar to Simon de Beauvoir’s claim in The Second Sex that “one is not born, rather, becomes a woman” (283). Yes, gender is constructed and such scales depend on the constructed forms of the criteria based on traditional gender differentiation. Thus, this repetitive construction by society has forced us to behave in a way that we occupy the extremes by rejecting our liminality of gender.
Therefore, if we consider based on Ken’s Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, it would be difficult for many to achieve any one of the very ends due to the intermixed presence of masculinity and femininity. As there is only one point that considers one as perfect male or female, all other points including that nearer to the extremes fall under the category of liminal existence. Thus, an evaluation on such basis would end up in creating a population within the liminal boundaries of the scale.
Conclusion
Saunders has well satirized the controversial topic within the limits of his humour through an ironical representation of the idea. He has used Ken as his fictional writer to distinguish his ideology from that of the satirical form of writing. Saunders criticizes the attitude of Ken’s society in their questioning of the manliness of a man or the femininity of a female if his/her characteristic features do not perfectly match with the so-called measure attributed by the society. The absurd tone via hyperbole of “My Amendment” distinguishes the voice of Saunders from that of Ken who is against same-sex marriage. Though absurd, the ‘Manly Scale of Absolute Gender’ gives a platform for the reader to rethink about what he/she is in the eyes of the society represented by Ken. The “anomie, alienation and angst” (Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, In Play, Flow and Ritual” 78) forced upon the queer society applies to the structural society too because according to the analysis conducted in this research based on Victor Turner’s and George Saunders’ insights, the majority are in their liminal status without having proper masculinity or feminine qualities. Activist and literary protests have found a way for the legalization of Same-sex marriage in certain counties like Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Finland, France etc. and is expected to widen its liberation in many more. In reality, it is not the gender scale that has made one in liminality but the oppression, inequality, bullying and discrimination has made them think that they are put into a liminal situation where they neither can be a part of the traditional society nor what they wish to be. At such circumstances, they are forced to the in-between state of liminality. One can only overcome such kind of liminality through the support and acceptance from their society.
References
Raisun Mathew, PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), Email: raisunmathew@gmail.com, Contact: 9048101997
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Dr. Digvijay Pandya, Associate Professor, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), Email: digvijay.24354@lpu.co.in, Contact: 9048101997