170 A F T E R I D E N T I T Y
No No Dear, this is the line for the little girls. And I say, I know, I’m a little girl. And you know the look that grownups can give you – the one that says you are loathsome and sick and vile and about to be abandoned. She gives me that look. And I know I’ll have to pretend to be a little boy from then on.44
Just as it was not part of Du Bois’ intention or original selfunderstanding to be different or a black while trading visiting cards, it was not part of Bornstein’s to be a boy while on the playground. Nevertheless, the understanding the teacher has of him as a boy becomes available to him as a way he comes to think he can be intelligibly understood. Moreover, just as Du Bois’ new self-interpretation with the racial identity it contains offers him an interpretive framework for understanding and living his life, Bornstein’s self-understanding with the sex and gender identity it contains offers her a way of thinking about and ultimately changing her life. What Du Bois and Bornstein understand, then, when they understand themselves in racial or sex and gender terms, are different texts than those with which they begin. These texts are the ones they must take up in new understandings of their futures. Yet, there is no one interpretive tradition or set of historical relations from the point of which Hamlet is uniquely intelligible. Nor is Bornstein uniquely intelligible as a man or a woman. In the first place, there are different ways of being a man and being a woman. Just as we cannot restrict legitimate understandings of texts to one canonical understanding, or restrict legitimate understandings of racial identities to one way of being a certain race, we cannot restrict legitimate understandings of men and women to only one way of being either. One may be a man because of one’s brain sex, or one’s body sex, or some other way, just as one may be morphologically, culturally, or ethnically black and be so in different ways. In the second place, just as we cannot restrict legitimate understandings of one another to racial understandings, we cannot restrict legitimate understandings of 44
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, p. 176.