{"id":1501,"date":"2025-10-09T15:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=1501"},"modified":"2025-10-09T15:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T19:00:08","slug":"blog-post-1-boy-in-a-whalebone-corset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2025\/10\/09\/blog-post-1-boy-in-a-whalebone-corset\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post 1: \u201cBoy in a Whalebone Corset\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cBoy in a Whalebone Corset\u201d by Saeed Jones is about a gay man who likes to dress femininely and this is found out by his seemingly conservative and non accepting father who reacts very harshly and negatively. \u201cIm against the wall, bruised\/but out of mine: dream-headed\/with my corset still on, stays\/slightly less tight, bones against\/bones, broken glass on the floor,\/dance steps for a waltz\/with no partner\u201d(12). The speaker is hurt, whether physically or emotionally and mentally after his father finds his feminine clothing. As I know from other Saeed Jones poems and his New York Times essay, Jones would use poetry to distract himself from his reality\u2013 to pretend he\u2019s not experiencing these feelings but rather a character he\u2019s written about. \u201cBruised but out of mine\u201d is the speaker\u2019s way of disassociating, from pretending he\u2019s anywhere but in his room watching his father burn his clothes. I imagine \u201cdance steps with a waltz\/with no partner\u201d to mean his journey of self-discovery he\u2019s had to take alone. \u201cFather in my room\/ looking for more <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">sissy clothes<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\/to burn. Something pink in his fist,\/negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.\/<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">His son&#8217;s a whore this last night\/of Sodom\u201d(page 12). His father is searching his room to look for more feminine clothing which later in the poem I learn he burns with a gasoline jug and matches in their yard. The italicized \u201csissy clothes\u201d could mean the father called them that. While the actions in the poem are quite literal, how it makes the author feel is represented in metaphors. Other Saeed Jones poems like The Blue Dress and Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown relate to this poem with the part clothes can play.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cBoy in a Whalebone Corset\u201d by Saeed Jones is about a gay man who likes to dress femininely and this is found out by his seemingly conservative and non accepting father who reacts very harshly and negatively. \u201cIm against the wall, bruised\/but out of mine: dream-headed\/with my corset still on, stays\/slightly less tight, bones against\/bones, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2025\/10\/09\/blog-post-1-boy-in-a-whalebone-corset\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Blog Post 1: \u201cBoy in a Whalebone Corset\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}