The power of the ordinary subversive in Jackie Kay's Trumpet
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74 The power of the ordinary
subversive in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet Tracy Hargreaves
abstract In Jackie Kay’s award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf’s version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay’s novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss’s African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.
keywords Jackie Kay; androgyny; transvestism; transgender; race aesthetic
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feminist review 74 2003 c 2003 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/03 $15 www.feminist-review.com (2–16)
Jackie Kay published her award-winning novel Trumpet in 1998, the same year that Diane Wood Middlebrook published her biography, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. Tipton’s story had been available for public consumption since his death in 1989, and it is reasonably well known: a successful, white, American jazz musician and entertainer, Tipton married five times and adopted three children, all boys. When he died, he was discovered to be anatomically female. In other words, Billy Tipton passed until he passed away. Jackie Kay draws on aspects of this true story as a source for her fictional exploration, in particular, she has said, because she was interested in William Tipton’s acceptance of his father’s female identity: I read a short news piece about Billy Tipton which intrigued me. His adopted son was quoted as saying, ‘He’ll always be Daddy to me,’ after discovering his father had been a woman. I was interested in the son’s acceptance of his father’s construction of his identity.’ (http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0499/Kay/interview.html)
1 Kay’s ambition for her novel, that its constituent voices would be a narrative version of jazz, echoes Marie Cardinal in The Words To Say It, cited in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: ‘My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and contain within itself the essence of the whole.’ (Morrison, 1992: vi).
Kay’s (1998) novel, like Middlebrook’s (1998) biography, is about the construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of a life. Her text is clearly concerned with issues of authenticity and mimicry and telling stories, all of which rest on being Scottish, being African, being a man and/or being a woman, and on playing jazz, the aesthetic appeal of whic
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