The Switch: Freedoms in Sexuality, Desire, Gender, and Identity

The broad aim of my dissertation is to expand the horizon and discourse of variant gender and sexual identities and practices through introducing the theoretical model, practice, and typology of the switch and switching; radical acceptance, understanding, and a new theory emerge. This emergence has the added impact of immediately and powerfully validating people's lives and experiences; by extension, the possibility for all to live with greater freedom, self-expression, and authenticity in exploring and playing with identity, desires, roles, and practices is established. My specific focus is to look at and celebrate non-normative/variant gender and sexual identities.

My specific aim is to reveal where and how gender and sexual variants create, revise, redefine, and play with language, roles, desires, bodies, public and private sex practices and identity in the action known as "switching." To switch, and the process of engaging in the action of switching, can most broadly be described as dwelling in, and having the intention of, honoring, exploring, and sharing different, switchable aspects of a state of being, idea or concept, person, persona or character.

I am looking at the intersecting practice of non-normative gender, sexual, and identity switching that all of my experimental authors and their characters play with. Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Anne Carson's translation of Sappho all demonstrate switching. The identities deconstructed in this dissertation create and give space to, by their playful and exploratory nature, a great deal of gender, sexual, and identity play and masquerade (whether they are stable or in flux); they elicit openings, possibilities, and ambiguities in writing, reading, deconstructing and recreating gender identifications, sexual identities, sex and gender roles, subversive and perverse practices, as well as subcultural and personal practices. Thusly, my project has a simple foundation: it is grounded in the possibility that anything is possible and that every one of us lives a life of full self-expression and freedom.