“…anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received.” (Sedaris, p10)
This particular essay, Go Carolina, draws implicit comparisons between trying to correct a lisp in speech therapy and trying to “straighten out” a “bent” sexual identity. The first part of the above quote serves the double-purpose of making the similarities clear through bringing up the subject of gender, which is closely connected to orientation, and then showing the effects this has on on the people subject to it–no correction is forthcoming, and the “patients” merely learn to better conceal their “condition”. The second part gives everyday examples of the deceit involved, and thus of the impacts big and small on their lives.
I saw a strong connection between the theme of this passage and the theme in Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal. In his work, Warner discusses the incorrectness of the feeling that, “controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins”. People in authority seek to prevent or limit “abnormal” sexual practices, including homosexuality, and use this suppression to amass social or political power. We see this in a smaller scale in Sedaris’s work, where the school system and Miss Chrissy Samson try to straighten out his speech impediment, while also using the therapy as self-improving status transactions. Agent Samson repeatedly condescends to and chides Sedaris, and he also notes the way his teacher repeatedly and unnecessarily brings up the subject in class. The crowning event of the narrative occurs later, when Samson guilt trips him into saying thorry, and then mocks him for doing so. There couldn’t be much of a better comparison for the way Warner describes authority figures using the shame of sex to bolster their own authority. And the similarities continue when Sedaris describes what results from these tactics: no actual change in beliefs, only lies as they continue like before, but in secret. The boys change their words instead of the way they say them, and hide their “girl thing” interests behind the expected boy interests that they lack.
The last part of what you’ve written here, where you discuss how the boys don’t actually change their behavior but simply find ways around their own speech “problems,” made me think a lot about the function of this narrative in Sedaris’ work. I’m wondering: does Sedaris frame the narrator’s changing of his words to avoid the “S” sound as a rebellion or as a kind of repression? By doing this he evades Chrissy Samson’s authority, in a way, but he also has to go the extra mile to “hide his ‘girl thing’,” as you put it. Is he resisting structures here or being victimized by them? Both?
(This comments is written by Dickinson5625. I’m posting it for Dickinson5625 because of a glitch in the system.) I think you make some excellent points and draw great connections in this post. However, I think saying that “People in authority seek to prevent or limit “abnormal” sexual practices, including homosexuality” is a little misleading. While I see where your connection is made with Agent Samson, I believe porn industries are very highly driven by abnormal sexual practices INCLUDING homosexuality. The largest porn market is “girl on girl.” But, what drives that market? If social and political powers are trying to suppress homosexuality, what then makes this a fan favorite?
Would it be fair to argue, in this situation, that the authoritative groups and the repressed groups are just going around in circles? It is true that dominant ideologies are frequently used to squash non-dominant ones and we thus end up with a homogeneous ideology. This ties into what bell hooks discusses in her paper on language- Chrissy Sampson would perhaps, in bell hooks’ mind, symbolize the publishers who would not release books that were written in black vernacular, and wanted to have the “standard English.” Perhaps Sedaris’ way of speaking is similar to bell hooks’ in that he is speaking in a form of vernacular- with a “gay” affectation. In this way, this story could represent not only an attempt to control his sexuality, but also non-normative ways of speaking.