Our thanks to Dr Lizzy Attree, Adjunct Assistant Professor in our Liberal Arts programme, for her blog contribution during Pride month, which reveals the beauty in two novels which explore the complexities of identity and much more.
Dr Attree explains, ‘Within our Liberal Arts programme, in the Narratives of Change course, we read novels and poetry which deal with social issues such as gender, race, class, technology and the environment. We consider a landscape of global ideas through the lens of contemporary literature and consider the ways in which social change might play out in literature.’
Read on to discover what makes Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, so special for Dr Attree.
Gorgeous novels
In the Narratives of Change course we read novels and poetry which deal with social issues such as gender, race, class, technology and the environment. We consider a landscape of global ideas through the lens of contemporary literature and consider the ways in which social change might play out in literature. The first novel we read is Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, which features a character named Reese who is becoming a man; and the last novel is Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, which centres a gay relationship between two teenage boys in Hartford, Connecticut.
Published in 2020, just after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, The Vanishing Half shot to the top of the bestseller list – it features twin sisters Desiree and Stella who grow up in 1950 America. The twins run away from their snobbish, light-skinned “coloured” town Mallard, in Louisiana and embark on separate paths in life. Desiree eventually returns to their hometown with her daughter Jude, after fleeing an abusive husband. However she discovers that Stella has reinvented herself as a white woman living in a posh Los Angeles suburb. The complexities of identity stretch from the concealment of Stella’s true racial background, to the experiences of transgender individuals who navigate societal expectations and conceal their authentic selves.
It is the story of the twins’ daughters, Jude and Kennedy, which brings in the character of Reese – a photographer – who dates Jude at UCLA in the 1980s. In Chapter Five we learn that “On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese… the truth was that he’d always been Reese.” In a novel primarily about race, it is interesting to discuss with a class of American and other international students, what it means to think about race in 2024, after Black Lives Matter, and after Barak Obama and Rishi Sunak, Trump and Brexit.
What is significant about reading The Vanishing Half, is that issues around transgender rights, and other gendered issues of identity (in light of the repeal of Roe Versus Wade), are often discussed with more complexity than racial issues, which particularly in this novel, are rooted in discrimination felt to be rooted in the past. Using Judith Butlers’s theory of the performativity of gender, students can access arguments around a ‘third gender’ and analyse the possibilities of a gender and sexuality spectrum, using the example of Reese to consider a character whose identity is never questioned or destabilised in the book, in the way that Stella’s identity as a ‘white’ woman is.
In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog and Trevor meet on a tobacco farm in the 1990s where they both work amongst Mexican immigrants in the summer months. Little Dog is a Vietnamese American, who is raised by his mother and grandmother, who have both been scarred by the Vietnam war and Trevor is a white boy who does not believe he is gay. The relationship is depicted as both tender and brutal at times, and the author Ocean Vuong has talked about the importance of writing a book about “rural queerness”, in which “fleeing to the metropolis was not the final act. There’s a lot of suspicion and doubt about that, the metropolis being the only place we can go. Some of us can’t afford to go there,” he says. “I wanted to keep these two boys in the rural space so that they are protecting a tiny flame between each other, with no models.”
In this novel students can explore ideas of masculinity as well as homosexuality, alongside themes and issues of immigration, post-traumatic stress disorder and how memories are passed between generations in families in a space that is both safe, and open, and helps us to understand and empathise with the variety of experiences and expressions of identity in our world through fiction.
