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Being In-Between in Jackie Kay's Trumpet

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Being In-Between in Jackie Kay's Trumpet Università degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e la Cooperazione Internazionale Classe LM-38 Tesi di Laurea Being in-between in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet Relatrice Laureanda Prof.ssa Annalisa Oboe Chiara Sestini Anno Accademico 2014 / 2015 2 Contents Preface.................................................................................................................p. 5 Chapter 1: Trumpet, a multiplicity of voices....................................................p. 9 1.1 Jackie Kay’s life and career................................................................p. 11 1.2 Who was Billy Tipton? How did he become Joss Moody?................p. 12 1.3 Trumpet vs Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton............................p. 14 1.4 Structure of the novel, points of view and style.................................p. 15 1.5 Multiple perspectives: an analysis of the characters..........................p. 23 1.5.1 Millie, Colman and Sophie Stones.........................................p. 23 1.5.2 PEOPLE: the doctor, the registrar, the funeral director..........p. 33 1.5.3 PEOPLE: the drummer, the cleaner and the school friend.....p. 40 1.5.4 Edith Moore...........................................................................p. 45 Chapter 2: Joss Moody: the man and the woman........................................p. 47 2.1 Contextualizing theories about ‘homosexuality’, ‘heteronormativity’, ‘queer’ and ‘trans-people’.................................................................p. 49 2.1.1 History of homosexuality and heteronormativity...................p. 49 2.1.2 Queer theory...........................................................................p. 52 2.1.3 Trans-people: transsexual and transgendered.........................p. 56 2.2 The trumpeter: the man and the woman.............................................p. 59 2.2.1 The man: Joss Moody.............................................................p. 61 2.2.2 The woman: Josephine Moore...............................................p. 63 Chapter 3: The practices of cross-dressing and labelling.............................p. 67 3.1 Cross-dressing in Trumpet..................................................................p. 69 3.1.1 The ‘ritual’ of the wedding ceremony....................................p. 77 3 3.2 Discussing the main reasons to cross-dress: ambition or sexual orientation?........................................................................................p. 80 3.3 Consequences of Joss’s death on Millie and Colman’s lives..............p. 82 3.4 Labels and the implications of using them.........................................p. 90 Chapter 4: Trumpet’s music: jazz as a process of identity formation.........p. 99 4.1 The origins of jazz............................................................................p. 101 4.2 The influence of music in Trumpet...................................................p. 107 4.2.1 Music references in Trumpet................................................p. 114 4.3 Performing jazz and defining identity...............................................p. 123 Chapter 5: Constructing a Black-Scottish identity.....................................p. 131 5.1 The relation between Jazz and Diaspora..........................................p. 133 5.2 Defining a black-Scottish identity in Trumpet..................................p. 138 5.2.1 Last Word.............................................................................p. 145 5.2.2 Racial Prejudices..................................................................p. 148 5.3 The question of names in Trumpet....................................................p. 153 References.......................................................................................................p. 165 Abstract in italiano........................................................................................p. 175 4 Preface Trumpet by Jackie Kay was published in 1998 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The novel tells the story of Joss Moody, an African-Scottish, transgendered jazz trumpeter, who was born female but lived as a man throughout his life. As other works in Kay’s production, this novel reflects her interest in stories in which individuals live across conventional borders of nation, gender and race and challenge the concept of identity. Kay’s sensibility to these themes comes from her direct experience, since she was adopted at an early age, and she soon began to experience racial prejudices. Her literary paths reflect her personal voyage to find her African roots and her birth parents. In particular Trumpet explores the themes of love, loss, grief, memory, cultural belonging to a home, a culture and it shows how issues such as nationality, gender and sexuality contribute to the construction of an individual’s identity. The inclusion of transgender identity and transracial adoption in the novel is useful to explore gender categories, in particular the concept of lesbian specificity. She explores some of the ways in which homosexual love can be expressed in a heterosexual culture by asserting difference. She depicts gender and sexuality as unstable concepts and negotiates lesbian love within the context of a society still constrained by the idea of sexual binary oppositions. In an interview Kay said: I was interested in how fluid identity can be, how people can reinvent themselves, how gender and race are categories that we try to fix, in order perhaps to cherish our own prejudices, how so called extraordinary people can live ordinary lives. I wanted to write a love story where the reader would become so involved with the story that they too would believe Joss and be calling him ‘he’ to themselves.1 Kay’s desire to explore “how fluid identity can be [...] how gender and race are categories that we try to fix”, calls into question the idea that man and woman are natural categories in Trumpet. She shows that the self is a collection of ‘multiplicity of selves’.2 1 https://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0499/kay/interview.html 2 King 2001, pp. 106-107. 5 The purpose of this thesis is to discuss issues revolving around identity construction in relation to Trumpet. I try to explain how sex, gender, nationality and jazz music contribute to this process and to demonstrate that none of the transgender subjects I have examined can be definitively identified as transsexual and none can be read as lesbian. Kay points out that it is not possible to state the identity of a person just by using a label. I present the possibility for multiply-constituted people to occupy a “third space”, where everyone is described as “hybrid”. My work is divided into five chapters. The first one introduces the author and the novel. I explain how the story of Billy Tipton, a famous American jazz player is related to Joss Moody, the main character of Trumpet by comparing it with Middlebrook’s Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. Then I focus on the use of a multiple perspective narration and analyze the main characters and their perspectives, which all contribute to build Joss Moody’s story. In the second chapter I contextualize the concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heteronormativity’, and I discuss the meaning of ‘queer’ and ‘trans-people’. Then I tackle the character of Joss Moody which is an absent presence in the novel, as Hargreaves suggests: The subject position from which Joss speaks is always liminal; his is a spectral voice haunting the text, a metaphysics of presence, and yet his speaking is also, in a very literal sense, a matter of life and death, implying that there is much, politically, at stake in his speaking. 3 I focus on how he constructs his identity, outlining the fact that he has always been at the same time a man and a woman. Kay represents identity as not fixed, something which is in constant change since it is defined by many different aspects, such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, class and ethnicity. In chapter three I deal with practices and theories of cross-dressing and how it is related to Trumpet. In the novel Kay discusses this issue and the difficulty of fitting into identities that do not reflect who people really are. I try to justify some of the reasons which have led Joss Moody to cross-dress. I outline the impact that Joss’s construction of identity and death has on Millie and Colman. Through the representation of a 3 Hargreaves, p. 15. 6 seemingly typical heteronormative family, Kay shows how insufficient this discourse is when there is the need to identify people. Joss and Millie’s relationship is different from the traditional one, but this goes unnoticed from the beginning of the novel. Kay depicts Joss as a typical heterosexual man in a typical heterosexual marriage, a ritual which automatically labels them as “husband” and “wife”. As Knockaert points out, “these institutionalized identities are [institutionalized] in the sense that they have become part of officially established practices and institutions, and they are clearly instrumental in the perpetuating heteronormative discourse”.4 I therefore focus on the implication of using labels. In chapter four, I talk about the importance of jazz music as a tool of identity formation. In the novel the repetition of chapter headings, multiple narrative perspectives and language create a structure which reflects jazz rhythm. First I discuss the origins of jazz and I outline the main music references
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