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<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">I appreciate this conversation, and might add another perspective. I led an fourth-year Honours seminar on Woolf this Winter that included a number of gender diverse students.
<i>Orlando </i>turned out to be a difficult piece for many of them, and their initial encounter with the text nearly turned them off Woolf.<br>
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<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">Ultimately, they were able to work with <i>
Orlando</i> and some of the stereotypes it involves (e.g. Archduke Harry) through its historical contexts: era-specific cross-dressing and gender performance, sex theories, Vita's adoption of a masculine persona, the pantomime references, the operation of camp....
Some contemporary criticism on <i>Orlando</i> was more problematic, particularly in terms of claims that position the text as a trans* novel (which, of course, Pamela Caughie does not). While my students acknowledged the narrative as a deliberate fantasy,
they were careful to point out that it was not written by a trans* individual or about a trans* individual: i.e. Orlando lives their life as a man and then as a woman, but not as a trans* person who experiences gender dysphoria or gender euphoria.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">I look forward to reading Margaret Homans's piece and to this ongoing conversation that, as Susan points out, engages a diversity of perspectives over time. With that in mind, I wonder the extent to which my class's
resistance to the novel and its politics speaks to a specific trans* community (twenty-somethings; Western Canada; activist-based) and an approach which differs from, say, that of Lucas Crawford. It'll also be neat to see how these students present their readings
of Woolf in the years to come. <br>
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<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">Regardless, when leading future classes on
<i>Orlando</i>, my goal would be to clarify those feminist and LGBQ literary studies approaches to the text in which the term "trans" is used metaphorically or connected to a deconstruction of gender--to fluidity, to the multiple selves of which Woolf writes
so often, to life writing beyond the box, to the anti-patriarchal strategy of defying binary logic--but not necessarily to trans* lives or embodied experiences. So, still figuring this one out.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">Yours,</p>
<p style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">Ann<br>
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<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">Dr. Ann Martin <br>
Vice-President, International Virginia Woolf Society</div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">Associate Professor, Department of English</div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">College of Arts and Science | University of Saskatchewan</div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">420 Arts Tower Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5 Canada</div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">306.966.5527</div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">(she, hers)</div>
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