Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as
genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When
you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:
A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length
comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on.
But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic
animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s
growing-up years.
The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty
general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside,
they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe
which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of
gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their
experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both
feel deeply wrong to them.
The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation
(like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who
you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have
no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.
So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this
book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you
through the lens of one person’s experience.
You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s
not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to
grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either
a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what
could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself
relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their
parents and/or peers, that is.
Definitely worth a read.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts?