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Morph Constructing identity: how the experience of cyberspace contributes to the emerging story of self in young people. Jill Lesley Clough Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature Language, and Linguistics Newcastle University April 2013 Awarded October 2013 Supervisors: Professor Linda Anderson, Professor Jackie Kay Abstract for Morph. Constructing identity: how the experience of cyberspace contributes to the emerging story of self in young people. This thesis develops from the belief that young people construct identities for themselves which inevitably surprise their parents, particularly where so much of their coming-of-age is influenced by hidden virtual experiences. The novel which explores this is Morph. Joey, the protagonist, is uneasy about her gender. She has a loving family, intelligence, a satisfying way of life, but loathes her body. She investigates alternative futures, initially online. Her closest friend also has a secret, revealed after a suicide attempt that Joey averts: sexual abuse by her father. Each has to discover how to live with the evolving sense of self. If Joey wishes to change gender her character may alter, too; she finds she can be violent when confronting the abusive father. The story is told through Joey’s eyes and activities in cyberspace, which she thinks of as a free place, parallel to the mountains over which she loves to run. She feels at ease in both places. Eventually she decides to live as both male and female (Other) because she does not have a ‘condition’ needing to be cured. Classification in the natural world allows for infinite variety, and she want similar opportunities for herself. The critical aspect of the thesis begins with those aspects of my experience which affect my conception of the narrative, including how, as a teacher, I drew upon insights from neuroscience about the malleability of the self. I analyse a series of interviews with young people about how they present themselves online. Since the trigger for the novel is online disclosure of gender variance, I explore what is available online, current medical attitudes and policies; I set the interview findings in the context of theoretical frameworks for personal and group identity. I conclude that where young people lack frameworks for interpreting virtual experience, the emerging sense of self may be destabilised, or even impaired. i Dedication To all those children and young people who have educated me ii Acknowledgements I can’t thank enough my two supervisors, Professor Linda Anderson and Professor Jackie Kay, firstly for their inspiration and secondly for their generous interest in what I was writing. Both have produced cracking good ideas when I needed them, helped me to keep things in perspective, and waved flags to point me on my way. I couldn’t have managed without them. I am also indebted to my Annual Progress Review Readers over three years: Dr Andrew Crumey, Professor Bill Herbert, Professor Sean O’Brien and Tina Gharavi. Their feedback was invaluable, encouraging, thought-provoking. I had a splendid time attending short courses that illuminated and informed my writing of Morph: thank you to Professor Jackie Kay (again), Ann Coburn, and Margaret Wilkinson. Thank you to dedicated personal readers, for patience, detailed feedback and warm encouragement: Viccy Adams, Isabel Clough, Alex Lockwood, Des O’Halloran, Jan Wiltshire. Finally, thank you to the young people who volunteered to talk about their lives online, and to six young men at Heaton Manor School, Newcastle, who read Morph under the aegis of the Head of English, Lynn Kerr. The good-humoured and appreciative responses of all of them have been truly heartening. iii Table of Contents Part One Constructing identity: how the experience of cyberspace contributes to the emerging story of self in young people Chapter 1 Background to the narrative………………………………..1 Chapter 2 Gender and identity……………………………………….12 Chapter 3 Identity online: research findings………………………..23 Chapter 4 Identity online: a wider context………………………….51 Reference list……………………………………………………………...76 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….....81 Appendix: Transcriptions of interviews with young people………….....85 Part Two Morph Mirror……………………………………………………………………….170 Wall…………………………………………………………………….…..227 Scar………………………………………………………………………....287 Rock………………………………………………………………………..353 Wilderness………………………………………………………………….418 iv Part One Constructing identity: how the experience of cyberspace contributes to the emerging story of self in young people. v Chapter 1 Background to the narrative I have long been interested in aspects of the relationship between child and adult: the boundary that marks the grown child’s transition to adulthood; the interrelation of child and adult in the mature personality; the capacity of small children to behave parentally; the reversal of roles when the parent must be cared for by the child. I am intrigued by how we experience the boundaries between these states. Three aspects of my own experience fuel this interest: the struggle to become myself, as I saw it, when I was a teenager; life as parent and grandparent; and time spent in educating teenagers. As a teacher and headteacher, I often found myself mediating between young people discovering what they wanted out of life, who perceived themselves as virtually adult, and their protective parents, who saw them as children. I could better manage these situations once I grasped that we are all irrational as parents, however well-balanced our professional lives. Under the influence of deep-seated emotion, we are tied into the parent-child relationship. Young people only break free of this when the stories they tell themselves, and others – their constructed identities - are sufficiently compelling for parents to recognise them as adults. Many parents are surprised by shock when the once-vulnerable child acts with the authority of an adult. The idea for Morph came from an anecdote. A friend told me about her niece’s declaration to her through Facebook that ‘she’ was really male, on the verge of starting hormone therapy. The online disclosure to a loving relative was the precursor of the revelation to parents. The girl-into-boy wanted the aunt to act as a bridge to her parents. This offered the framework for the story I wanted to tell, of how parents must accept the reality that their children have experiences unimaginable, ultimately, to anyone else, however close. I wanted to tell that loving family story too, to place the challenge of a gender crisis within the bounds of perceived normality. I chose the discipline of a first person narrative so that the young person’s voice would be unmediated by adult commentary. The intertwining of child and adult is complex. As a society we do not like unclear laws; business structures that are not solidly defined; ambiguous relationships. We are invited to classify ourselves on a daily basis: UK British White; female; between 45 and 60; and whilst it is possible to avoid some of these classifications on 1 Facebook we cannot actually join without declaring ourselves to be male or female. There is no provision (at the time of writing) for opting out. The anecdote I took as inspiration, about the slipperiness of gender classification, arouses even more unease for those who assume the evolutionary inevitability of male or female, that sex is the same as gender, and that the stability of society requires a binary identification of gender and sex. Although society dislikes ambiguity, it is inevitable, and I saw this as a rich source of material. One example is where adult child must deal with demented parent, and authority shifts from one to another. The demented parent is often powerful, just as children are powerful. A crying infant compels the parent to respond, even though the image of a baby is usually associated with dependence. My thinking about this was influenced by my working for several years with The Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies, which works at group dynamics. Any group is liable to project its unconscious desires and fears on to individuals or sub-groups. Insights gleaned here helped me to understand the forces at work when parents or teachers react confrontationally to the behaviour of young people. For instance, a group of headteachers, for whom I was once a mentor, concluded that all children want to be controlled. By this, they meant subject to rules and boundaries established by adults. From this work, I learned to understand power as the assertion of superior strength, whether physical or psychological, over another. The crying baby strongly influences our emotional response. Authority, by contrast, is the exercise of appropriate power, conferred by a role (judge; traffic warden; teacher) or developed through a process which enables the individual to act with the informed consent, not compliance, of others. We react to the crying baby as parents or carers, expecting it to learn how to meet us on our terms. We do not intend to deal with the baby as if we were babies too, although that is effectively what sometimes happens when parent-figures lose self- control. The young transgender person of my anecdote seeks family understanding rather than approval for a new gender role. S/he no longer needs permission but the informed consent that one adult offers to another. In practice, many people with gender crises either hide these or leave home to find social settings which accept their transformation. I wanted to explore the story of someone who challenges her social context to change because I was never able to accept professionally that the role of a school is to ‘fit’ young people into society, on the 2 assumption that ‘society’ is fit for the young. Young people often decline to ‘fit in’, which leads some adults to project on to young people their concerns about the exercise of authority. An experienced headteacher once told me that he had crossed the road to avoid a crowd of teenagers, only to realise that they were the same age as his own daughter.

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