Reading Gender

"Even though most reviewers agree that the narrator is female, the only evidence that they marshal is highly contestable and merely exposes the often stereotypical and hetero-normative biases in their own reading practices." I think that this statement from Rubinson's article is in many ways exactly the point of the book. Everyone who has read the book or is still reading will at some point try to search for clues about gender. We as humans using language and imagery have invented this stereotype about each gender. We assign certain characteristics to a person based only on that knowledge. It is not something that we should be ashamed of because it is the only way we've ever learned to read. The clues are usually put in the book for us to determine and give us an image of what character we read about. Now when these elements are gone, we have so much trouble identifying with a character. In this story the author wrote the narrator as a completely genderless person and I can safely assume that almost everyone read the book looking for clues. I can acknowledge the fact that I did this as well. No matter how hard I tried to avoid this idea of gender I still took each clue as a hint and tried to pick what I thought it was. Even if you didn't want to look for those key words and points, your mind still did the searching. With books like this we can realize the way that we've been taught all along and how it makes us conform to the roles our society places for men and women. It really helped me see just how far this has taken me, because I can't even read the book without some small part of my mind wandering and trying to pin a gender to the main character. This is just one of the ways in which we are conditioned to think differently about sexes and not for how much they are the same. Throughout the novel the descriptions that are given about the narrator are things that can not be specifically designated to one sex or the other. In Rubinsons article it states, "And that is exactly the point: it implies that such information is or should be useless." A reader will always have the desire to know who it is they are relating to. Reviewers of the book also took parts of text and use those clues to determine what gender they were reading. It is not something important so why was there such a need to find this piece of information out? Only because we are trained that way. I also think another safe thing to assume that if the audience did find out this information it would change their perspective of the narrator completely. A reader will assign certain characteristics like being the more assertive male or female. Even though these traits are things that they can assign to each gender it just makes them feel comfortable reading when they can fit into these prescribed roles that society has conformed them to. I don't think there is anything wrong with us because we never knew about it until this book came along. I do think that now it should be changed. This book allowed me to experience and understand just how far it is implanted and we didn't even know it. I came to realize that I myself am biased much more than I thought I was. I found it difficult to read and understand without generalizing somethings to a certain character.