Before continuing further, it is necessary to outline the pronouns that I will be using
throughout this paper. Ely Shipley uses the gender-neutral pronoun ‘hir’ when referring to the
Boy with Flower speaker (see “The Transformative and Queer Language of Poetry”). 4 At first
this pronoun seems odd to an unsuspecting reader: it disrupts the flow of the sentence and
challenges grammatical rules. However, it is through disturbing language patterns that Shipley
is able to destabilise cultural assumptions about binary gender, which traditional he or she
pronouns inevitably reinforce. To honour these language and identity claims, ‘hir’ (object),
‘hirs’ (possessive), and ‘hirself’ (reflexive) are the pronouns that I shall be using in relation to
Shipley’s speaker.
With that in mind, I will begin with the poem “Memory” as it highlights clearly how Western
society conflates flowers and femininity. It begins:
When I was four, a man
selling flowers on an island in the center
of a city street leaned into my father’s
car window and placed one in
my hair. More than petals, I remember
the dirt beneath his nails
as if he’d just pulled those flowers
from a garden, and for me only. 5
This scene is a prominent example of gender inscription upon the body of a child. As Annette
Stott’s article “Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition” shows, there is a whole history of art,
literature, and thought depicting women and flowers ‘as equally passive, beautiful, and
decorative’. 6 By placing a flower in the speaker’s hair, the man engages in the continuation of
that historical tradition and thus imposes a feminine label on the speaker. The man does not
know the speaker, yet he makes an assumption about hirs gender by reading the body as it is
perceived from the outside. Moreover, although the speaker does not specify what type of
flower was placed in hirs hair, hir does nonetheless recall the dirt embedded beneath the
man’s fingernails. Dirty nails connote hard work: one ‘gets their hands dirty’ through performing
manual labour. Yet in this scenario the man is ‘working’ towards normative gender
enforcement. The man physically pulls the flower, a visual description of femininity, out of the
ground in order to place it specifically in the transgender speaker’s hair, thus reinforcing the
Ely Shipley, “The Transformative and Queer Language of Poetry,” in Troubling the Line: Trans and
Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, eds. TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson (New York: Nightboat
Books, 2013), 197-98.
5 Ely Shipley, “Memory,” in Boy with Flowers (New York: Barrow Street Press, 2008), 45.
6 Annette Stott, “Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition,” American Art 6, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 61.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109092.
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