Breaking Down the Walls of the Ivory Tower

I've just emerged from the white-washed walls of academia. I've no regrets about doing a PhD - I got funding for it otherwise there was no way I would have even considered doing it. I viewed it as an independent research project which enabled me to grow as a human being and nothing more. I entered into it with no expectations of an academic career and emerged with even more zeel than ever to immerse myself in activist pursuits, siding myself with academia's rebellious 'little' sister - the black sheep of the family who is never mentioned at the family table and who will never get a job working with 'daddy'!

It's nice to be away from it all - the bureaucracy, the back-stabbing, the cult of the celebrity academic with an ego the size-of-a-mansion, get outta my way or I'll crush you under my designer label shoe mentality. It wasn't easy writing about a subject which I lived 24/7 - transgenderism - and it wasn't easy deciding to start physically transitioning from female-to-male - losing supposed friends and family and enduring the everyday consequences of being gender ambiguous. All the while my supervisor, a gender theorist with allegedly cutting-edge views of gender and performativity (how I hate that word now), insisted on calling me by my birth name (I had long since legally changed my name) and consistently used the wrong pronouns with an arrogant 'don't-fuck-with-me' sneer.

But, I got through and it looks like it's gonna be a while before I go back. I applied for a teaching and research post at the same institution a few weeks back but got rejected. I was an ideal candidate they said, but my research on gender variancy was too cutting edge for a project oriented towards 'queer=gay, oh and maybe lesbian, studies'! In other words, you can pretend that you are cutting edge and reap in the benefits of wearing an 'I'm an activist' badge on your academic sleeve but don't actually BE an activist. Heaven forbid, we don't want any unruly ruffians rocking 'daddy's' safe, white colonialist cruise ship now do we?

But anyway, speaking of breaking down those ivory tower walls, here's a snapshot of my thesis. If you want to read more, please leave a comment with your email and I'll send some stuff to you:

'Boyish Aesthetics: Images of the Boy from Peter Pan to Contemporary Female-to-Male Transgenderism'

Since his creation in 1902 by JM Barrie, Peter Pan, or the boy who would not grow up, has come to be regarded as the epitome of boyishness within a nostalgic Anglo-American cultural imagination. However, the alleged essence of boyhood - as a stage of becoming the man - is missing from Peter Pan’s gender development. Simultaneously a boy (on account of his eternal boyhood) and yet not a boy (on account of his refusal to occupy a normative boyhood), Peter Pan belongs to the interface between boys and girls - betwixt-and-between the realms of fairies, humans and birds. As a neither/nor, Peter Pan is a disruptive figure that blurs binary categories, traverses gender divisions (boy/girl) and refuses age developments (childhood/adulthood) in order to embody the promise of new gendered possibilities and alternative modes of boyishness.It is significant, then, that when translated to the stage women have traditionally played the part of Peter Pan. Yet, what happens when the performance of the boy is removed from the sanctity of the stage and is embraced not in the context of a staged performance of theatrical transvestitism but as an identity expression in its own right?

This research highlights the significance of the legacy of Peter Pan for those who are born female but who choose to enter the realm of boyhood upon reaching adulthood.Prising boy from the realm of male gender development, I examine adults who rework the notion of growing up and who invest in boyishness as a creative and political tool of intervention. Starting with a relatively unknown group of women artists who were known as ‘the boys’ and who were working in Edwardian England during the ‘Peter Pan epoch’, I trace the repercussions of the Peter Pan legacy in the work of contemporary female-to-male transgendered artists working in Western Europe and North American a century later. I translate Peter Pan’s refusal to grow up into a queer, feminist, and anti-racist project for challenging the patriarchal signifier of The Great White Father - a shorthand for the privileging of the white, middle class and heteronormative male subject within a dominant Anglo-American ideology.

Keywords: Peter Pan, Edy Craig (Edith Craig, 1869-1947), Chris St John (Christabel Marshall, 1873-1960), Tony Atwood (Clare Atwood, 1866-1962), Ellen Terry (1847-1928), Smallhythe Place, Carrington (Dora Carrington, 1893-1932), Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob, 1894-1954), Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe, 1892-1972), Nazi Occupation in Jersey (1940-1944), Charlie Chaplin (Charles Chaplin, 1889-1977), female-to-male (‘FTM’) transgenderism, Kael Block (1979-), XX Boys, transboy ‘phenomenon’, Tara Mateik (1975-), Simon Croft (1966-).