sauvin wrote:Eli is what she is, whatever that might be. For us, she's a character in a story that does a powerful job of telling a story; as such, the only reason she might "worry" about her "gender identity" might be because we insist on doing so on her behalf. The real issue isn't her gender per se ("assigned" or "identified" or otherwise) so much as how Oskar perceives it in the light of his developing relationship with her. It's not about Eli, in other words, it's about Oskar... and about us.
Oskar is the main character, it's really his story. We meet all of the other characters through Oskar, not that they all have a relationship with him. Some are neighbours, but still in the story due to some connection to Oskar. So, Oskar's perceptions are very important, more so than Eli's perceptions. It is Oskar who faces the major conflict. Eli's gender is part of that conflict, or rather Oskar's perception of Eli's gender.
sauvin wrote:When Eli says she's "not a girl, not a boy, not young, not old, she's nothing", she probably isn't very focused on the fact that she no longer has the anatomical equipment to help bring the pitter patter of tiny feet to the ten-room house she's probably never going to own or share with anybody. She's a monster (but she isn't, really); Hakan correctly thinks of her as being more than a couple centuries old (but she isn't, really); she's just a slow and stupid child (but she certainly made short enough work of the Rubik's Cube that stymied so many geniuses, didn't she?). She's not a boy, and she's not a girl in pretty much the same way she's still fully human (except when she isn't) but saddled with an illness that pretty much "defines" her as an enemy of all humanity.
We read this differently. I get an anxiety, a self-consciousness from Eli concerning the lack of anatomy. So, in my reading I see the I'm not a girl, boy, child, etc., as arising from that anxiety, self-consciousness. So, I think that his anatomy was very much in the forefront of her mind. I'm nothing, is considered and not off the cuff. Again, as I read it.
I think that JAL does a great job of developing Eli so as to she her true humanity. Eli is very human. For me Eli is not the monster. While the perception of most would be that Eli is an inhuman monster, understandable for those who do not get to know her. We actually see more of her humanity than Oskar sees. We see her negotiate with Tommy to purchase his blood. She doesn't need to do that, she is more than capable of taking it. But Tommy is important to Oskar, so him living is important to Eli. Then we see her pray to God. The same prayer the cop sees in her name, my god, my god, why have you forsaken me. That is a very human thing to do. So we get to see the humanity that Latke, Virginia don't get to see. Humanizing the murderous, blood sucking monster is part of why I am infected.
Of course JAL humanizes all of the characters. And does a great job of it. Some have less humanity than others.
sauvin wrote:This has been discussed at great length in the past, sometimes with considerable heat. The only thing I personally know enough to say is that she's actually something of an undecideable proposition, that she is forced to exist in a kind of lightless and airless vacuum so far from the ecliptic of what's normal to the average person that we just have no kind of calculus to use in positioning her properly. For all that she sometimes exhibits masculine traits, as far as I can see, she's so utterly genderless that it just hasn't mattered at all in basically forever, something that most of us could never understand because it's too utterly foreign to our "either this or that" way of looking at things.
I would hope that the discussion doesn't get heated.
Those raised in and who have been attracted to post-modern thought, like those pre-moderns, may have less of an issue with atypical gender than our friends still entrenched in modernity with all its categories and everything in its category. We understand that things are rarely as neat as our categories would suggest. But this is a worthy discussion because people are being harmed for being gender non-conforming, hurt by being dehumanized, I digress.
I don't see Eli displaying masculine traits, but that could be my not gendering play. Add to that the fact that in my experience girls have been drawn to puzzles than boys, someone(s) suggested that puzzles are masculine.
sauvin wrote:It may never have mattered. Boys will be boys, it's said, and this seems true regardless of the boys' ages, but I have a strong impression that before a certain age, this "boy-ness" is an abstract concept that has no real emotional consequence, that it's just another fact of life, right along with the green-ness of the front lawn or the blue-ness of the daytime sky. The fact that the dangly bits might someday be somehow involved with becoming a father might be known, but also probably in a relatively abstract way - the boy of ten who loses his orchids to garden shears won't suffer quite the same kind of loss as the young man of fifteen who has to suffer a similar physical loss, because the former will quite literally never know what he's missing, whereas the young man of fifteen almost certainly does, at least to an extent.
The trans children I know girlness and boyness matter a great deal, even in children younger than Eli. It may matter more to them than it does to their cis counterparts because the social pressure to to conform to the ness opposite of the ness they identify with.
The difference between Eli and the poor kid who lost his heuvos to the garden shears wasn't infected with whatever it is that infects Eli. Here we can only speculate as to the effects of infection.
sauvin wrote:We do indeed walk a "precarious ledge" when "assigning" a gender to somebody else, and we walk just as precarious a ledge when getting a bit too involved with pigeonholing somebody for whom the fact (or fancy) of gender "identity" may not matter at all. In doing so, we simply fall into the same kind of trap with which Oskar himself had to wrestle in the hours or days after learning that his new girlfriend "isn't". All we really do is expose our own fears and prejudices.
Like I've been saying, we need to let Eli define Eli. Ultimately Eli's gender identity shouldn't matter. We should accept whatever that may turn out to be, if we ever know, which I doubt.
sauvin wrote:Are we really going to allow ourselves to worry about if she's really a he (or he really a she), if she's "straight, bi, gender-queer" or whatever when she's probably too young physically, mentally and emotionally to qualify as "legally old enough to give consent" - and will remain so for however many decades or centuries she might have before the sun sees her again?
Orientation and gender are separate entities. Yes, it is important to learn to not misgender people, including children. To let them define themselves and avoid the impulse to force people into our perceptions of them. Misgendering is dehumanizing. And the story itself deals with orientation. Oskar's conflict comes from these issues, his orientation and His perception of Eli's gender. Can he over come the negative attitudes he has heard about being gay? Which he does. We struggle because Oskar struggled.
