{"id":499,"date":"2015-02-19T08:55:52","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T13:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=499"},"modified":"2015-02-19T08:55:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T13:55:52","slug":"screwballs-unite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/02\/19\/screwballs-unite\/","title":{"rendered":"Screwballs Unite?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHe\u2019d used the word screwball<\/em>, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we\u2019re defined by our desires, I was in a lifetime of trouble\u201d (Sedaris 29).<\/p>\n

At this point in David Sedaris\u2019s book, Me Talk Pretty One Day<\/em>, Sedaris recalls his experiences taking guitar lessons with a \u201cmidget\u201d named Mister Mancini. After seeing people ostracizing and mocking Mister Mancini in a restaurant, Sedaris decides to come clean about his distaste for guitar and secret passion for singing. After singing the Oscar Mayer commercial in a Billie Holiday voice, Mister Mancini calls him a \u201cscrewball,\u201d telling him, \u201cI don\u2019t swing that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this passage, Sedaris repeats the words \u201che meant\u201d as he reflects on Mister Mancini\u2019s reaction. This repetition connotes the significance of the implications of Mancini\u2019s use of the word screwball<\/em> to describe Sedaris. \u201cHe meant\u201d suggests that when Mister Mancini calls him a \u201cscrewball,\u201d he wants to say something else. By stating, \u201cHe meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute,\u201d Sedaris hints at what exactly Mancini really \u201cmeant.\u201d Since Mancini wants Sedaris to \u201cplay his guitar like a woman,\u201d naming his guitar stereotypically masculine names, such as Doug or Brian, implies that he is sexually attracted to men. Additionally, mentioning that he should have \u201ctaken up flute\u201d references the tendency for people to associate \u201cfeminine\u201d things, such as the flute, to gay men. This shows that he is perceived as an effeminate gay boy, leading the reading to think that Mister Mancini means to say faggot<\/em> or gay<\/em> instead of screwball<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In \u201cQueer and Now,\u201d Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick emphasizes that the word queer<\/em> can often \u201cdeepen and shift\u201d with meaning as it intersects with different identities such as language, skin, migration, and state. Although Sedaris may have not been specifically thinking about queerness when he had this experience with Mancini, it can be applied to the situation. When he sees that Mancini is ridiculed because of his identity as a \u201cmidget,\u201d Sedaris relates Mancini\u2019s place as an outsider to his own experiences being marginalized due to his perceived sexuality. Although Sedaris may have felt a shared identity of \u201coutsider\u201d or \u201cqueer\u201d with Mancini, his homophobic response to Sedaris\u2019s singing shows that notions of queerness is not universal. Sedgwick states that \u201canyone\u2019s use of \u2018queer\u2019 about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else\u201d (9). This passage therefore sheds light on Kedgwick\u2019s ideas about the importance of first person in queer identities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHe\u2019d used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we\u2019re defined by our desires, I was in a lifetime of trouble\u201d (Sedaris 29). At this point in David Sedaris\u2019s book, … Continue reading Screwballs Unite?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2594,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}