(This is gonna be short.)
Firstly, I think it might be wise to adopt gender-neutral pronouns for Quentin from here on out.
Now, I realized something last night, while watching an interview with Judith Butler on youtube (the audio doesn’t sync to the video, so I recommend just listening to it without watching). For our purposes, the important part begins about 4:40 and ends around 6:40.
In my original formulating of my ideas concerning Quentin’s genderqueerness, I had it in my head that Quentin may actually be MtF trans*. That is, I believed I would end up proving that Quentin is not in love with Caddy incestuously, but rather that ze wants to be Caddy. I am now almost convinced this is not the case. At least not presented within the text.
I still believe Quentin wishes ze could be Caddy, but ze comes across as much more envious of Caddy’s gender fluidity rather than Caddy’s femininity. Quentin is already a very effeminate character in hir own right. Hir problem is not that ze cannot present as female and he wishes ze could. No. Quentin’s problem is that ze wants to present as strictly male, which ze cannot do. Ze tries desperately to fix hir gender performance as 100% male, but ze is unable to successfully pass. At least, in hir own eyes, ze is not successfully passing.
It seems to me, much like those boys Butler described who committed murder, that Quentin is lashing out at hirself for failing to perform hir masculinity properly: ze can’t fight (ze faints, as ze describes it, like a girl, when ze tries to fight Dalton Ames) and ze can’t lose hir virginity. Quentin does not fit into either extreme of the gender binary and ze feels so threatened by hir inability to label hirself, or to fit into the label ze was assigned at birth, that Quentin must take hir own life.
What is ze trying to do though? Protect the male | female binary from hirself?
