"The Joy of the Castrated Boy" and "How to Bring Your Kids up Gay"

From the moment I read the title of Lee’s essay, “Joy of the Castrated Boy,” I asked myself, what is this joy, and where does it come from? In the end of the essay, Lee notes, “what works (for the castrated boy) is to accept mistakability as not only a fact of life but a point of joy and liberation.” This is confusing to me, since “joy” seems as something that comes naturally to people. However, the fact that the castrated individual has to work to achieve this joy by accepting the unacceptable does not seem like a proper solution to larger problem. Even if one accepts this mistakability in identity, it doesn’t make the mistakability any less apparent to the rest of society. Sedgwick’s essay “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay” poses this problem in relation to gay and lesbian children and youth who “face a hostile and condemning environment.” The solution, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services is to end discrimination against youths on the basis of sexual orientation.

Sedgwick’s essay discusses how boys need other men to validate them as masculine. This points to the notion that people constantly need justification from others to identify themselves. According to this idea, the castrated boy cannot fully accept the mistakability of others regarding his own identity. In his essay, Lee noted how his mother filled him with horror stories to snap him out of his girlhood. Sedgwick explains how parents’ “hatred and rage at their effeminate sons is really only a desire to protect them from peer-group cruelty.” However, this idea that “grounding an identity in biology is a stable way of insulating it from societal interference” is problematic. This “societal interference” would not be necessary in the first place if it weren’t for this need to identify humans within specific categories of sexual orientation and gender. For example, in “Joy of the Castrated Boy,” Angela Carter “proposes that if a male wants to perform femininity, the phrase “male performance” has to become meaningless.” This is similar to Ambroise Pare’s “Monsters and Marvels,” which asserts that a transgender individual with both female and male genitals has to choose which sexual organs to use and cannot change this decision. There is a certain fear people have regarding individuals who express both feminine and masculine characteristics, which causes them to instill certain rules and order.