Butch Geography

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ … This is [Waite’s] genius … to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and…”