A Day in The Monster’s Life: A Short Story for Children and Confused Adults
“The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not precisely mine.”
–Judith Butler in “Giving an Account of Oneself” (p. 26)
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This short story book that I created explores the daily life and thoughts of a trans-species entity or a monster in human drag, as a metaphor for transgender and transracial people, cross-dressers, and drag kings and queens. It deals with and questions the matters of constructing an identity through performance/becoming, and passing.
Butler writes in her article “Giving an Account of Oneself”, “If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others” (22). But then she goes onto tell that this is not the case. If the subject was indeed not opaque to itself, the Monster could go out without the fear of scaring people off, but in order to be recognized as a person, it has to abide by the norms of the society (appearing to be a human being in this case). Regarding this recognition, Butler writes:
[I]f the Other confers recognition—and we have yet to know precisely in what that consists—it does
this not primarily by virtue of special internal capacities. There is already not only an epistemological
frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain
kinds of anthropocentric dispositions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face
to any one of us. After all, under what conditions do some individuals acquire a face, a legible and
visible face, and others do not? (23)
The Monster’s struggle is precisely that of gaining a legible and visible face, by way of fashioning itself as a person that falls into the ready-made epistemological frame, and trying to abide by the norms that dictate what does and does not constitute recognizability (and respectability).
In daily life, it seems like it takes no effort for “regular” people (cis, straight, not handicapped and white people), and for the rest of the people it does take an effort to be accepted in the society and be recognized as a “regular” person. But as Juliet Jacques writes in Trans: A Memoir, “[E]verybody had a gender identity to manage, but ‘transgendered people are probably more aware of doing the work’” (108). What the main character and its getting in human drag process reveal is that, for “regular” people, too, shaving and putting make up on are common parts of the process, but not everyone notice it because it has been that way for their entire lives.
I wanted to do a children’s book specifically because in Trans: A Memoir, Jacques made clear that transgendered persons go through the confusions of how they feel versus how they “must” appear at very early ages. She tells that when she was ten, she tried on her mother’s clothes, and she writes, “It just felt natural. Calmer. More comfortable. Then I heard my parents’ car pull up the drive. I got changed, trying to make everything look like I’d never touched it … I just felt confused – I didn’t know what it made me, or what would happen if anyone found out. I just knew I wasn’t supposed to do it, but that I felt happiest when I did it” (114). For children who feel like they need to dress or act differently among other people, in a way that they feel uncomfortable, just to be accepted, I wanted this little book to provide them with a monster’s situation that they can relate to, and at the same time a tool by way of which they can express how they feel.
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