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Books to Borrow Open Library. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. Annabel Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Being liberal, Thomasina is open minded and embraces the possibility of other forms of existence outside the sex binary of male and female.
For her, intersex identity is another possibility, which unfortunately, society does not want to recognise and accept since intersex bodies neither conform to the ideals of compulsory able-bodiedness nor compulsory heterosexuality in sexual and social performance. It is after the surgery that Thomasina tells Wayne the truth about his anatomy. Doctor Lioukras, the physician he consults, tells him: [You are] a true hermaphrodite [ An almost complete presence of each [ Any change in facial or pubic hair.
If any of these things happened he was to get Jacinta to drive him to Goose Bay and see Dr. Lioukras right away. Almost every day Wayne imagined such changes had occurred. It was hard to know if he had a real or an imagined ache. For Foucault, docile bodies are basically those that are rendered powerless and are objectified under the gaze of the disciplinary powers that seek to control them. The purported docility of the intersex body connotes the unfortunate fact that society and medicine objectify bodies they strive to control, in the process denying the subjectivity of individuals who possess such bodies.
It is this realisation that prompts him to rethink his identity despite what mainstream society made him believe all the while. It is this confusing realisation that makes Wayne contemplate taking decisive steps in comprehending his anatomy.
He makes a decision to leave his home town in search of a new place where he could live as an intersex individual; a place where he would not feel compelled to fit into the male-female binary. The journey motif employed by Kathleen Winter in the narrative becomes very important in the analysis of the subject matter in the novel. Johns marks the beginning of a new life for Wayne Blake.
This journey is not only physical but also becomes psychological in that it becomes a travail through which he tries to comprehend his anatomy and decide his gender identity. His soul searching is revealed in his musings as he contemplates: 1 This is a kind of fertilization that occurs when male and female gametes sex cells produced by the same organism unite. It occurs in bi-sexual organisms, including most flowering plants, numerous protozoans, and invertebrate animals.
Not the son your dad wanted. Not a son who kept up family traditions. Not a Labrador trapper, strong mettled and well read, solitary but knowing how to lead a pack. Instead you were ambiguous, feminine, undecided. He believes that he is still searching for belonging in a world characterised by binary thinking — a world that does not allow one to exist in a grey area, different from the majority. This fact leaves Wayne Blake confused with his ambivalent gender identity, which comes about because of the intersex anatomy.
On this journey of self-discovery, Wayne decides to stop taking the pills that made his body what the world wanted it to be instead of what it wanted to be. He makes this bold decision but his greatest fear becomes that of social stigma; upon the realisation that people in his world belong to a strict gender dichotomy. The people, were one, extremely so, or they were the other. The women trailed tapered gloves behind them and walked in ludicrous heels, while the men, with their fuzzy sideburns and brown briefcases, looked boring as little beagles out for the same rabbit.
You define a tree and you do not see what it is; it becomes its name. It is the same with woman and man. Everywhere Wayne looked there was one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other.
The loneliness of this cracked the street in half. Could the two halves of the street bear to see Wayne walk the fissure and not name him a beast? His body neither conforms to standards of compulsory heterosexuality, which require that you either exist as a man or a woman with heterosexual orientation, nor does it conform to standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that define the ideal human body.
This choice and commitment does not go without consequences. The changes in his body are noticed by the society and some people, including his boss, begin to resent him.
As such, in order to accommodate the intersex individual in mainstream society, intersex anatomy should not be regarded as disability or as an abnormality.
Rather, it must be considered only as a form of difference, since every one of us is, in essence, different from the other. Realising that no body is ideal and that we all fall short is certain corporeal aspects whether perceptible or not will help in challenging and debunking the stigma against the intersex anatomy. Instead of stigmatizing intersex people, mainstream society should direct its efforts towards understanding intersexuality merely as difference and not as disability or monstrosity.
In this regard, the value of the literary text analysed in this paper cannot be overemphasized. Through the fictitious account of the protagonist, this novel serves to expose lives that are usually on the margins by highlighting issues that are often eschewed in mainstream discourses. As such the problem identified in this paper mirrors problems that real people in the real world may be facing, silently or openly.
As such, the findings of the paper should not only end with the text in question and the fictional character involved, but they should be applied to address real life gender identity problems that intersex people face in our societies today. Wesley Macheso Mzuzu University machesow mzuni. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Having read about this book ages ago and been interested, it was chosen as my book club read for this month so I had high expectations.
The subject of dual sex is fascinating and brave to use in a first novel. My concerns that the book would be sensationalised were proved to be wrong as Wayne was described in a very sensitive way. Throughout the book we didn't really get to know Wayne - this could have been achieved by more exploration of his thoughts than his experiences.
Reading the book is uncomfortable though I'm pleased I did and would recommend others to do the same. The family's life revolves around Wayne's secret and this has huge effects on how the 3 adults who "know" deal with each other and interact with Wayne - the basic principle being that no-one knows what to do for the best.
The author brings in lots of symbolism and significance which is sometimes dealt with in a clumsy way. Examples being that the conflict in Wayne is reflected in those around him and his parents act in exaggerated ways to show the difference between men and women. There were parts of the book which flowed better than others and the description was too detailed at times but the story was compelling and I was hooked.
I often find the end of books disappointing but I loved this one - no tidy conclusions and lots of questions unanswered. This book will stay in my head for some time to come. This book broke my heart. It overwhelmed me. It's finely written, sensitive and delicate but sometimes compassionately passionate. I loved and believed in Wayne completely, so much so that there was a point deep into the novel where I had to stop reading because I wasn't sure I could bear what might follow.
But there is no schlock here and the quiet ending felt perfect. There's so much to revel in: not just the characters and the intersex experience but the thick, cold bleakness of Labrador and its social rituals as well as its wilderness. There are scenes that stay in the mind because of their visual and emotional power, and gentle surprises that colour Wayne's parents - even his grey, silent father. It is the story of an intersex child born in a remote coastal Labrador village in Primarily, I feel, Winter has written an homage to self-determination and self-preservation.
An intersex child is born with atypical reproductive anatomy — both male and female anatomy are present. Advocates for intersex infants argue against surgical alterations of gentalia and reproductive organs being performed in order to accommodate societal expectations of what it means to be male or female in the world.
Jacinta Blake gives birth, in her bathtub, at home. Her closest friend, Thomasina, is assisting with the birth. Thomasina is the first one who notices the baby has both male and female genitals.
She immediately begins to refer to the child as Annabel, in tribute to her own daughter who has recently died. He is also started on a regiment of hormones to keep his body more male than female. All of this is kept from Wayne while he is growing up but he is always aware of not feeling whole as he is.
Thomasina, however, addresses the child as Annabel, when they are together privately. I feel point of view is everything, in life and in literature, and I hope the book treats the points of view held by its divergent characters with equal respect.
In many ways, this book is, for me, about suspending judgment. When you understand why someone acts the way they do, even if the actions cause sadness or difficulty, then I think you can redirect your energy to something more fruitful than judgment. I also hope the reader will have the kind of reading experience I think books are really about: a connection with the characters and a suspension of the loneliness of being human.
I hope this story, like all good stories, might give the reader a kind of relief and a joy. I feel she achieved perhaps more than she could have hoped for. Winter has created a wonderfully memorable story and Annabel the character is such a beautiful portrait of what it means to be human. What an amazing book! I was struck by the respectful way the characters were drawn so that even when someone made a decision that, from the readers perspective, was clearly not a good one, it remained understandable and right in its own way.
So much love This is the best book I've read in a while. The characters are deeply drawn, from the quietness and intelligence of Treadway, who is tormented by the knowledge of his child's condition, to Jacinta, dealing with suppressed longing for her former life and a spiraling depression, to Thomasina, the wise and perceptive world traveler, and finally to Wayne, struggling with all sides of his identity.
Intertwined with all of them is a deep love. Kathleen Winters' writing is heartbreakingly beautiful, her descriptions so realistic you can almost see, hear, and smell beautiful Labrador. Very sensitive story about a child born to a trapper and school teacher wife in Croydon Harbour, Labrador. The time period is and the child is raised as a boy. However, he never really fits in and things change dramatically at puberty when a visit to the Goose Bay hospital is required.
Some really good characters fill the story including the Treadway and Jacinta Blake, his teacher Thomasina and friend Wally Michelin. Well written with very believable characters. In , in a barely populated area of Labrador, a baby is born to Jacinta and Treadway Blake.
Born in the bathtub with three neighbor women in attendance, only one person, Thomasina, notices that the child is not quite the same as most babies. This child has both penis and vagina. Treadway names the baby Wayne, declares it will be raised as a boy, and not long after, the vagina is sewn shut. Treadway, a man who spends the better part of the year running trap lines in the wild forests of Labrador and lives a basic, homesteading life, goes out of his way to teach Wayne to be a man of the same sort: tying knots, trapping, reading sign, skinning and preserving pelts, snowmobiling.
Treadway is a decent man. He is not mean or nasty or even a misogynist. He simply knows that life will be easier for Wayne if there is no question as to gender.
And life is easier for men than for women. Still, I had a very hard time empathizing with Treadway. Despite his love for Wayne, he cannot see gender as anything other than a strict binary.
Jacinta is a dim character, not fully realized. Thomasina is the liveliest of the adults. The location itself is a character; it is brought up frequently and shapes the people and their lives. Sometimes the stories intersect; most often they do not. The story of the land is achingly beautiful, but I found myself wondering at times why it was in that book. The writing itself is beautiful, especially in the descriptive passages. But the characters could have used more work, and the book could have lost some of its size and gained focus.
Actual Rating: 4. Simply wow. I have no words to describe how much I adored Annabel. Honestly, I don't even consider myself worthy of reviewing such a masterpiece, but I feel that I should share the beauty of this novel with other readers, which is why I will try my best to do justice to this glorious piece of literature. I was actually searching the dictionary for words that I could use to describe Annabel when I came across the word "dainty", which means 'delicately beautiful' and that is precisely what Annabelis.
In , in Croydon Harbour, Labrador, Canada, Jacinta Blake gives birth to an unusual child who is neither male nor female but both in one body. The child is born with the reproductive organs of both males and females. Doctors come to the conclusion that the baby can be raised as a boy and the truth remains concealed with the boy's parents, Jacinta and Treadway Blake and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina Montague.
Annabel is the story of Wayne's journey from the time of his birth to his infancy, adolescence and youth. But above all that, Annabel is about seeing and appreciating beauty in all the various forms that it presents itself in.
It is about how society perceives anything and everything that is strange and unusual. Jacinta and Treadway were cherubic. I loved reading about the progress and ups and downs of their marriage. As parents, both of them want the best for their child and as humans, they want others to accept their child for who he is even though their discomfort and confusion about him is evident in the early phase of Wayne's life.
Treadway tries to mould Wayne into a young man whom he can be proud of, at the same, Jacinta has this deep urge of guarding the part of Wayne that screams to be a girl. Jacinta and Treadway share a wonderful relationship with each other and with their child.
When author Kathleen Winter describes Jacinta and Treadway, she doesn't just elaborate the two of them, but you get a glimpse into the live of any inhabitant of Labrador, a glimpse into society in general. I absolutely admire Jacinta and Treadway Blake's neighbour and the woman who first realised the strange notion that came with Wayne's birth, Thomasina Montague.
I am in complete awe of Thomasina. She was a caretaker, mentor, teacher and in a very uncharacteristic manner, mother to Wayne. After losing her own husband and daughter, Graham Montague and Annabel Montague, she is inclined to selflessly devote herself to Wayne.
She decides to secretly reincarnate a part of her lost daughter in Wayne by naming him Annabel. They Thomasina and Wayne shared an enchanting relationship. Thomasina was brave and resolute. She was everything you wish every individual on this planet could be or could strive to be.
Another character that I really admire is Wally Michelin, Wayne's childhood best friend who, in a secret and sublet way, makes Wayne reach out to parts of himself he didn't even know existed. She was everything Wayne wished he could be. They shared a lovely relationship and I loved how their story ended. I have read in many reviews that the reader wants to hug the character they read about.
I always found it rather funny. Until I read about Wayne. I now know exactly what someone means when they say that they want to hug a book character. Reading about Wayne and getting to know him made me want to pull him close and hug him tightly.
I loved Wayne. As a child, he seemed so mature for his age and curious too. I loved his curiosity. I felt for him.
At times, I was silently weeping for Wayne. Relying on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, this essay discusses the argument Annabel makes for an alternative invention of sexuality that makes intersexuality a space of lived experience, grounded in a non-violent reality. As Winter suggests in Annabel, the struggle for human justice points less to the human- ness in us all than it asks us, in the name of non-violence, to accept difference as a necessary challenge to dominant understandings of the human.
Wayne grows up think- ing he is a boy when, in fact, he is both male and female. Sexuality is both spatialized and discursive. Neither space nor body are thought of in contemporary theory as empty containers willingly waiting to be filled with meaning. Originally from St. After all these years, however, she still longs for her native St.
This familiarity gives Jacinta a sense of security and points to her lived space, the ways in which she experiences and interprets her daily routines. He would much rather live by himself on the land all year round Thus, for the six months every year that he has to be in Croydon Harbour, Treadway likes to inhabit the house fully, attempting to replicate in another physical space the silence of the land and thus making his life in Croydon Harbour correspond as much as possible with his ideal of the open land This act of spatial mimesis constitutes his lived space.
Her own life suggests that, yes, you can, if the circumstances are favourable: that is, if you are independent, flexible, and strong enough to challenge social and political norms. What seems to matter most to Thomasina is that her perceived and lived spaces correspond; if they do not, she moves on, regardless of what people may think of her actions. For Lefebvre, the bodily lived experience is an inter- pretation of the body as perceived in everyday life body as physical entity and as conceptualized and theorized body as mental construct.
Lived spaces are therefore never impartial. Both Treadway and Jacinta argu- ably suffer from the social constraints of marriage. However, because of her particular position in society as a woman and wife, Jacinta has fewer means available to her than her husband does to negotiate the obvious conflict between her perceived and lived spaces.
In the end, however, and regardless of how much their movements through space vary, Jacinta, Treadway, and Thomasina all share a bodily lived experience of presence.
Being born intersex does not in itself constitute a medical emergency Dreger 30 , and yet, the bod- ily lived experience of intersex people is determined by medical inter- vention because a body that is both male and female perceived body does not fit into medical-biological-cultural-religious notions of human binary sexuality conceived body.
Whether they are intelligible to this matrix or not, human bod- ies are, therefore, essentially spaces. Prisons and psychiatric hospitals exist on the fringes of society where, ideally, they need not be seen or experienced by those not placed in them.
The same may be observed about intersex people who have undergone surgery as infants or small children. In order for them to become intelligible to the cultural matrix, they have to become invis- ible to themselves. Their bodies are neither truly here nor there, leaving their personhood undone. Displaced within their own bodies, their lived space is that of living as prisoners in their own body. Wayne grows up completely estranged from his parents particularly his father and other residents of Croydon Harbour, with the exception of Thomasina and Wally, his only friend in school.
He feels oddly out of place in the small, male-dominated fishing and trapping commun- ity of Croydon Harbour. In one of these dreams, he is walking alongside a river, trying in vain to make out his face in the water Wayne cannot see the reflection of his face because, in order for him to become intelligible to the world, the female part of him has to become invisible. This circumstance remains entirely lost on Wayne, however, as does the reason why he continues to have dreams in which he is a girl.
The same kind of dramatic irony is present when Treadway dis- mantles the bridge that Wayne has started using as a hang-out place for himself and Wally , However, rather than allowing the expression of an alternative intelligibility, Treadway feels compelled to silence this expression so as to make it fit dominant norms.
The result for Wayne is that there is no language available to him — verbal, archi- tectural, visual — that could render his self intelligible to himself, that could help him escape the prison that is his body.
What makes his body intelligible to the outside world denies his own personhood. Feeling betrayed by his family and seeing no future for himself in Croydon Harbour, he leaves. From the isolated place that is Labrador, Wayne moves to St.
Wayne decides to stop taking his pills, thus protesting the medical conceptualization of bodies as either male or female and thereby triggering his own rebirth as both Wayne and Annabel. Customers start wondering whether he is male or female , so he begins to deliver his meat later in the day and eventually has to accept the help of Steve Keating, who offers to do the meat deliveries for him Wayne thus directly challenges those people who have claimed power over him all his life: the representatives of science who, based on the binary construction of sexuality, determine the line between normal and abnormal bodies.
The St. Finally aware of the ironic displacement of his own body, Wayne is able to take a proactive approach toward his life. In allowing his body the freedom to be whatever it desires, Wayne not only reinvents sexuality, he also literally embodies this very reinvention. The city allows Wayne to embrace his formerly imprisoned self, yet it is also a site of violence against him.
The ambigu- ity of the city as a space of both self-knowledge and violence is not lost on Wayne. Encouraged by his experiences in Boston, Wayne starts university in Halifax.
Annabel achieves more than a mere critique of dominant discourses of sexuality, then. Like space, sexuality is grounded in language and discourse. While Wayne embodies this reinvention, Thomasina provides the neces- sary philosophical context.
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