Things to Read: Playing with Gender
By Kay Steiger - Dec 18th, 2008 at 3:20 pmOver at Campus Progress today, Miriam Pérez, an editor at Feministing, writes a review of a book that is supposed to be a “tell all” of Savannah Knoop, who impersonated the infamous fictional character JT Leroy. For those of you that that don’t know about Leroy, it’s nothing short of confusing:
Knoop’s memoir is based on her experience as an impersonator cum literary celebrity. Knoop spent six years impersonating JT Leroy, the famed author of various popular supposedly autobiographical fictions from the 1990s, including Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. The books were allegedly written by and largely based on the life of JT Leroy, a gender-bending male who is a former truck driver and sex worker. The plot only gets more confusing from there, as Knoop—a queer woman—takes on the task of impersonating JT for the media and resulting celebrity buzz. She was enlisted by her sister in-law, Laura Albert, the actual author behind the JT Leroy books.
But the memoir — and ultimately the whole JT Leroy creation — ends up reinforcing the insensitive trend of sensational accounts of gender-bending and transgender people:
The real problem with the whole JT Leroy circus is that instead of presenting real issues about gender non-conformity and transgender identity the book meshes them all together. The books of JT Leroy are about a gender-bending male, whose identity is unclear, but Knoop as JT throws various embellishments about hormones and surgery into the mix. The treatment of JT as a representative of a member of the gender non-conforming community is insulting at best.
Go ahead and read the whole thing here.
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