I find myself amazed, reading the excerpt from Mellor, Patterson, and O'Neil's Reading Fictions, how deeply gendered my own reading of "A Lot to Learn" was. I guess I have a lot to learn! I assumed that the scientist, by the name of Ned, was male (not surprisingly, but still--if "Ned" had been an elementary school teacher I might have allowed for the possibility that "Ned" is the shortened form for a female teacher). And, given that first assumption, I found myself in a brief shock when an actual girl appears in his miracle machine: a naked eight-year old girl with freckles and a brace (what kind of brace? I cannot really imagine that). Two readings that immediately popped into my head were: a. Ned is caught up short by his sexist assumption about women as "girls," available to him whenever he wishes for them (like money, a martini or bottle of beer); b. Ned is actually a pedophile and got exactly what he asked for. The reading that did not occur to me, but that instantly occurred to me when Ned became Nell, is that he/she wanted a child (of course, the wish for a member of the opposite sex--that's still a bit weird, even if we think of Ned as Nell).
But then why say "hell"?
The entire exercise or experiment made me deeply aware of how my readings of texts are shaped by gendered expectations, much more so than I thought.
What brought me up short right away, however, was the reference to "opposite sex"--a dead give away, in my mind, that the story's, or at least Ned's, expectations about gender are heterosexual (or what is sometimes called "heteronormative"). The assumption is that there are two sexes, each of them opposite to the other--some might call this a very rigid, binary model, that does not allow for the fluidity or even multiplicity of gender.
What if Ned is a transgender scientist seeking to confuse the machine he created?
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