Why Christine and the Queens makes me feel like I’m ten years old and climbing a tree by Kate Mossman
I’m sure I’m not the only woman in the audience for whom Letissier stirs up a very strong, half-forgotten feeling of wanting to be a boy. Dolls were thrown out of my pushchair when I was small – I said they were “slimy”. I never owned a dress. For my fourth birthday, someone – no one can remember who – bought me a sword, a helmet and shield in bronze plastic. My first love, Freddy, and I met at nursery: we planned to get married and become builders. My second love, at primary school, I barely dared speak to – but we communicated through sport, competing at the backstroke down the length of the swimming pool, our necks strained and our eyes meeting. My secret alter ego, who lasted from the age of six to 11, was a boy called Ratty – part Artful Dodger, part Jo the crossing sweeper. His parents and sister had died in a freak accident and he was condemned to scavenge for food in rural locations.
When I was Ratty, I never felt more alive. It wasn’t that I thought boys had more fun: there was something bigger going on, to do with energy and freedom. I was straight, so I fancied boys – and to fancy them, and to want to be them too, made for a throbbing kind of self-sufficiency.
Watching Letissier slide across the floor in a perfect Michael Jackson move, or crouch on the rostrum with one knee raised like a runner about to take off, suddenly makes me feel wide awake, like I did when I was ten years old and climbing a tree. I wonder if women around me are getting a burst of that old, long-buried boy-feeling. There are no video screens, no close-ups, no head-set mics, but there’s a lot of marching around in a crocodile formation, like students in drama school. The whole set-up recalls the exhilaration of the first tribes you formed, the first “attitude” you showed; the oversized dad’s jacket or Michael Jackson glove you wore non-stop because you thought it made you look cool. When I got into secondary school, boys became aliens. But I do think that all girls are born half boy.
Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam
Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (takings a boy’s name or refusing to wear girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence. Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman), and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity.
That any girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing.
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