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Chapter 3: Penelope
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Megan thinks back to her “problematic childhood” during which her mother, Julie, treated her like it was the 19th century, not the 1990s. It’s only because of Bibi that she’s been able to have this revelation about her youth. Megan preferred to dress and look like her brother growing up, but her mother, “repeating patterns of oppression,” insisted on dressing Megan in cute dresses “for the approval of society.” Being cute defined Megan’s entire childhood, and her mother basked in the compliments, which validated her marriage to an African man. They’d made the world a better place by having this perfect child.
Megan’s mother suppressed her queer gender identity in her early childhood because, for a parent, a child’s deviation from society’s norms reflects on them, too. Her mother, who already subverted mainstream norms by entering into an interracial marriage, wants her biracial daughter to stand out positively, for her good looks, not negatively and shamefully, for going against gender norms. Julia feels pressured to present an image of a perfect family because society judges them for being mixed race and she wants to prove those judgements wrong.
Themes
Megan thinks that she should have been happy that her looks got so much attention, but she understood that being cute meant she was supposed to be compliant. When she rebelled against Julie and threw tantrums against wearing dresses, she felt like a disappointment. Once she heard her otherwise liberal mother tell an aunt “there’s something not quite right with Megan.” Despite her beauty, she isn’t feminine, and her mother worries for her and hopes she’ll outgrow it. Her dad Chimongo, who’s from Malawi, agrees with her mother and the day after her meltdown about the dress commands her to play with her Barbies. Megan hates her Barbies, going so far as to destroy them, for which she gets punished.
Although Julie asserts a liberal identity, her liberalism isn’t intersectional. Her progressiveness doesn’t extend to the queer community, at least not when it’s her kid who is the queer one. Julie openly expresses her opinion that there is something wrong with Megan because of who she is. Additionally, her definition of beauty is limited to the feminine, whereas beauty can be much more expansive than that. When Julie forces gendered items on Megan, she highlights how women, even though themselves oppressed by patriarchal gender norms, police other women and become enforcers of those harmful norms themselves. She does this work for the man in the house, Megan’s father, who plays a supporting role in this enforcement. Helpless in the face of her parents’ criticisms, Megan’s only way to express her feelings is by destroying the Barbies that, feminine and white, are nothing like who she is.
Themes
Her great-grandmother on her mom’s side, GG, was the only person who accepted Megan for who she was. Megan spends summers at her home in the countryside and loves that GG lets her run wild. When she turns 13 and gets her period, however, her mother shows up and tells GG that she can’t allow Megan to run around anymore because she needs to outgrow her tomboyishness. Her mother threatens to take away Megan’s summer visits, so while she’s around GG teaches Megan how to bake. GG promises that next year, when her mother isn’t there, she’ll let her run wild with her brother Mark again. They need to make sure Mark won’t reveal their secret, and he doesn’t.
GG provides Megan with a supportive home that she lacks with her parents. At the farm she’s allowed to be at home in her body and her identity. Julie thinks she can make Megan more feminine by having her perform stereotypically feminine tasks. She views Megan’s gender identity as a phase she’ll outgrow, rather than an integral and fundamental part of her identity. GG is Megan’s first ally and Mark is her second.
Themes
Megan’s mother is a nurse born and raised in England. She’s a little Ethiopian and African American through distant relatives but looks almost white. Her family is proud that each progressive generation gets lighter skinned, but Megan’s mother ruined that progression by marrying an African man. Her mother insists she’s color-blind when she looks at her husband, Chimongo, seeing only the “lightness of his spirit.” Megan doubts her mother’s color-blindness because her dad’s race is all anyone sees in him, including her mother’s own family, who were unhappy when they married.
Julie’s family has been deeply affected by their own internalized racism. Their shame over their Blackness is so great that they’re proud to have distanced themselves from it, the later generations now passing almost totally as white. Julie, however, rebels against her family by marrying a Black man and having children who are very clearly Black. Julie adheres to a common and problematic narrative of color blindness. While intended to suggest an acceptance of others regardless of race, the phrase implies that race doesn’t matter, when in an unjust society it really does. When Julie says she doesn’t see her husband’s race she is saying she doesn’t see an integral part of his identity. She’s not acknowledging how his experience of the world is shaped by his race, which everyone sees and often holds against him, including her own family.
Themes
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The different parts that make up Megan’s background make people assume that she’s mixed race, which she lets them believe even though she feels like she’s “just a complete human being.” The girls at school want her “natural suntan” and blond curls, and the boys are attracted to her. When her body starts to change with puberty, the hips and curves of womanhood don’t feel right to her. She hates her breasts and hates what she sees when she looks in the mirror. She hopes she’ll grow into her body, but with time she only hates it more.
Megan’s story exemplifies how mixed-race people are often exoticized. Her lighter features like her blonde curls lend her a proximity to whiteness that render her desirable in the eyes of the white people around her. She’s different, but not “too” different. Megan hates the term mixed race because she feels it undermines her humanity, chopping her up into categorizable pieces rather than seeing her as a whole person. The discomfort and dysmorphia she feels as she enters puberty add another layer of negative self-image. She’s neither growing into her body nor out of her tomboyishness as her mother hoped.
Themes
Megan shaves her head when she’s 16, much to her classmates’ dismay. Her friends start to abandon her, and GG reassures her that a haircut shouldn’t end a friendship. There was something wrong with those girls. Megan starts wearing men’s shoes and feels liberated when men stop checking her out. On her last day of school her classmates graffiti the chalkboard, calling her the butchest and ugliest girl in her graduating class. She walks out of school, knowing that brighter prospects await her in college, but still feeling like there will be something wrong with her forever.
GG remains one of Megan’s only allies as she’s abandoned by her friends and bullied by her classmates for her deviation from societal norms. Her friends, like her mother, are afraid to be associated with someone who doesn’t fit society’s gender norms for fear it will reflect badly on them by association. The classmates that call her butch and ugly reinforce what her mother has been suggesting Megan’s whole life: that being beautiful means being feminine, and that masculinity in a woman is not just ugly but pathological.
Themes
At night, Megan hangs out on the Quayside with people who are also outsiders. She does any drug she can get her hands on, anything that takes “her to a higher, happier plane.” Soon her experimentation gives way to cravings that have her sleeping with men for drugs. She sleeps with women, too, which she enjoys more. She drops out of school, instead working at McDonald’s and living at her parents’ house; they charge her rent because she’s ruined her life.
Megan retreats to the literal margins of society where she seeks refuge among other social outcasts. They provide her with a temporary home and community where she can be herself. She starts using drugs to cope with the pain of the rejections she’s suffered. She discovers that she’s more sexually interested in women, uncovering another marginalized identity that intersects with her race and gender. The emotional fallout from years of oppression and discrimination have sent Megan down a path of self-destruction. She’s imploding from within, but as a result of how she’s been treated out in the world. Rather than attempt to understand the causes of Megan’s behavior, or even recognize their role in her troubles, her parents punish her.
Themes
One night she lurks on her old classmates on social media, and is jealous of their happiness and success, even though she knows many of them have their own problems. Still, their posts make her decide to stop going to the Quayside, and she quits drugs cold turkey when her parents are out of town so she can hide her painful detox from them. Afterwards, she feels “born again.” Megan gets a full sleeve tattoo on her eighteenth birthday. When her mom sees it she pulls the tablecloth, and the special birthday dinner she’d prepared, straight off the table. Her dad threatens to throw her out for upsetting her mother, but Megan walks out first. When she realizes she left without money or keys, she asks to be let back in and all three apologize to each other.
Megan wants to be like her classmates who have played by society’s rules and lived up to its norms and expectations. Even though she knows their happiness online is a façade that hides inevitable problems, she wants and needs some of that happiness and success for herself. She returns from the margins to try and make it once more in the hostile world she lives in. The tattoo is a symbol of Megan’s rebirth. The fresh ink marks a fresh start and a proud assertion of her identity. To Julie, however, it forever marks Megan as different and deviant. Despite her own rebellion years before when she brought a Black man home to her racist family, Julie can’t or won’t accept Megan’s gender rebellion.
Themes
Megan realizes she needs to move out to find herself. Her mom begs her to stay, but by then it’s too little too late. She moves into a hostel and is ready to live her life on her own terms. As time passes, she sheds the expectations and identity that her parents wanted for her. She doesn’t feel like a woman and wonders if she wants to be a man. She turns to the internet and online chat rooms where she finds a trans community she didn’t know existed. She meets Bibi, who calls her out for being ignorant about things like gender being a social construct.
Megan has to leave the home that never sheltered her to find a new home and community where she’ll be free to not just be herself, but truly find and understand herself. Away from her parents, she’s freed from their gender enforcement. While Megan has spent her life suffering in the face of judgement and criticism, when she initially enters the trans community she brings her internalized biases and assumptions despite being a queer person herself. She’s lived as a queer person her whole life without knowing it. The experience and feelings are familiar to her, but she doesn’t have the knowledge or intersectional understanding of what queerness means.
Themes
From Bibi, Megan learns about the reawakened feminist movement. Megan grew up thinking feminist was a bad word, one her mom equated with manhater, which Bibi quickly dispels. Bibi wants to change the world, but Megan just wants to be herself first. Megan is attracted to Bibi, whose photo shows that she’s Asian with square glasses and shoulder-length hair. Megan asks Bibi to school her in feminism and gender. Bibi explains how society reinforces gender through constructed roles and traits. Although Bibi rejects gender roles, she knows she’s female and transitioned seven years ago so she could be what she always knew she was.
Again, despite her self-proclaimed liberal views, Julie instilled stereotypical and conservative thinking about feminism in Megan. Bibi is a radical whose identities and experiences fuel her desire to make social change. Megan, not yet at home in herself, isn’t ready to take on yet another new identity as an activist. Bibi gives Megan the language to understand what she went through in her childhood with her mother when she explains society’s reinforcement of gender norms. Bibi is Megan’s first example of a queer person living proudly and securely in their identity.
Themes
Megan’s mind is blown with the idea that she was born a woman and maybe wants to be a man and is attracted to someone who was born a man and is now a woman. She and Bibi spend hours chatting online, afraid that Skyping will kill the fantasy if they find they aren’t attracted to each other after all. Bibi grew up in England and moved far away from her parents who didn’t understand her transgender identity. In her parents’ eyes, she was supposed to grow up, marry a nice woman from the right caste, and continue the family line. Her gender-bending in a Hindu community was shameful, so her parents disowned her.
Morgan is growing into herself, exploring the possibilities not just for her gender but her sexuality, too. Bibi comes from first-generation immigrant parents. As their second-generation child they had dreams and expectations for her at odds with who she really was. Their relationship is shattered when Bibi fails to live up to those expectations. Bibi loses both her home and family as well as her Hindu community because they don’t accept her queerness. She reconstructs a new home and community within queer spaces.
Themes
Bibi works in a nursing home and the old people there who witnessed her transition are loving and accepting of her. She was happy to be in the body she’d always wanted, but also surprised at how much she’d taken the privileges that come with being a man for granted. Now she’s afraid to walk home alone at night and is taken less seriously when she talks. Her experiences, she explains, are what made her an intersectional feminist. Bibi tells Megan it’s her turn to talk about her gender identity. Megan is still unsure as she encounters all the options she didn’t even know existed.
Bibi’s experience in the nursing home challenges the assumption that older generations are unaccepting of the LGBTQ+ and especially transgender community. GG is another example that challenges this stereotype and generational divide. Bibi’s unique experience of having lived as both a man and a woman in a patriarchal, white-supremacist society means she has a stark understanding of just how much harder it is to be a woman in this world. These experiences helped her realize that all oppression is intersectional. The fight for transgender rights is deeply intertwined with the fight for women’s rights. Bibi opens up a vast world of gender to Megan, and Megan is still figuring out her place in that new world and community.
Themes
She discover identities like non-binary and Two Spirit and others like “quivergender” and “polygender,” which she describes as the “batshit-crazy end of the Transgenderverse.” Bibi is enraged by Megan’s cavalier dismissal of the way some trans people choose to identify, telling her she sounds like an ignorant oppressor. The call ends with both girls angrily dismissing one another. They don’t speak for four days and Megan fears the relationship is over until Bibi reaches out and asks to meet in person.
Megan’s internalized homophobia and transphobia is evident in her derogatory comment about the many gender identities that exist under the transgender umbrella. Just as her mother once did the work of patriarchal society by inhabiting the role of the oppressor and trying to change Megan’s gender identity, Megan, although gender queer herself, can likewise inhabit the role of oppressor. Although she’s doing this unintentionally, out of ignorance, her actions and mindset still perpetuate discrimination and oppression by upholding the status quo. Her ignorance almost costs her friendship with Bibi and her connection to her new queer community.
Themes
They meet in a café and Megan is immediately struck by Bibi’s beauty. Megan finds it hard to believe Bibi had ever been a man, until she starts “mansplaining” the gender expectations forced on women. Megan realizes Bibi is a woman with a man’s confidence and calls her out for trying to school Megan on her own lived experience. Bibi thanks Megan for this callout, and Megan is happy that this confrontation doesn’t derail their meeting. They talk for hours, holding each other’s hands across the table and delighting in strangers’ confused stares as they try to figure out their genders. Megan explains she doesn’t want to be a man, instead wants to be gender-free. She doesn’t want to take testosterone but wants to remove her breasts. They end up at Bibi’s house where they kiss and spend the night.
Although Bibi is a woman, she was socialized to become a man, and so sometimes slips back into the misogyny she internalized growing up as a young boy. Like Megan, Bibi unintentionally slips into the role of the oppressor, but her willingness to be called out and correct her behavior speaks to how committed she is to un-learning the problematic habits and behaviors she’s absorbed. Bibi and Megan challenge people’s understanding of gender. Their very existence is an act of rebellion and protest that forces those around them to expand their understandings of what gender can be. Megan finally understands what will make her feel at home in her body, settling for a non-binary identity. Bibi and Megan’s relationship is shifting from a mentor-mentee relationship to something romantic.
Themes
Megan looks to Bibi for guidance for how to start living gender-free in a world defined by the gender binary. Bibi tells her that dreaming is necessary for survival. When Megan worries that switching to gender neutral pronouns is too lofty a dream, Bibi tells her that she has to take this first step at changing the world, even though she’ll be met with resistance. Tucked away in the countryside where they feel safe, Megan and Bibi are falling in love with each other. Megan decides to try out they/them pronouns to see how they feel, excited to embark on their “quiet revolution” no matter the outcome. Bibi warns Megan that people are going to get their pronouns wrong all the time.
Bibi understands that dreams are fuel to keep going in a hostile and unaccepting world. Without dreams of a better future, the queer community would have nothing to fight for. Megan’s personal choices when it comes to their gender expression are an act of radical protest that will be met with judgement and discrimination. Bibi explains that just being a queer person living authentically out in society on a daily basis is a step towards radically changing the world. In other words, each queer person is their own one-person revolution.
Themes
Megan now goes by Morgan. It’s been six years since they decided to identify as gender-free. They’ve adjusted to being misgendered all the time. Tonight, they’re hanging outside the after party for The Last Amazon of Dahomey, directed by Amma Bonsu, the “legendary black dyke theatre director.” Morgan already misses Bibi even though they’ve only been gone a few hours. They’ve lived together for the past six years and have a happy and harmonious routine. Morgan spends every other weekend with GG who still lives on her farm despite being 93. GG doesn’t fully understand Morgan’s gender identity but is leaving the farm to them in her will so that Morgan can “invite all [their] non-binding people to come and stay,” so long as they promise to keep it in the family after they die, too. Morgan and Bibi are thrilled by GG’s idea.
Morgan has settled into their identity and knows how to deal with the judgement and discrimination that come with living life gender-free. Unlike Yazz, who thinks her mother, Amma, is outdated, Morgan looks up to Amma as someone who radically changed the theater world. Although GG doesn’t fully comprehend Morgan’s identity or the vocabulary of the queer community, her decision to leave the farm to Megan and Bibi is a radical act of allyship. Land is power, and by transferring that power to Megan and Bibi she is helping them carve out a safe, queer community that will provide refuge from a discriminatory world.
Themes
GG’s mother, Grace, never knew her father, Wolde. All she knew was that he was an Ethiopian seaman who got her mother, Daisy, pregnant on a stopover in England, never to be seen again. Grace wanted to know who he was up until the day she died, and in her old age GG felt sad that he’d remain a mystery forever. So, Morgan buys GG an Ancestry DNA test in hopes that it may help solve this mystery.
Grace spent her whole life longing to fill the void her father left in her life. His absence leaves her feeling like she’s without a complete home or community. She passes this feeling of loss and incompleteness down to her daughter, GG. Morgan wants to solve this intergenerational mystery that runs through the family history.
Themes
Back at the after party, Morgan is ready to get away. They’re only there to write a review for a magazine. Even though they’re a high school dropout, their massive Twitter following @transwarrior has launched them into “influencer” status. Their Twitter started off as a place to record their gender journey, and later transformed into a site of activism. With Morgan’s rise to internet fame, Bibi warns them not to let it get to their head, and though they insist they aren’t, Morgan sometimes worries they’re not being truthful. A publisher wanted Morgan to write an autobiography, but they declined because much of their family has since come around to their gender, so they don’t want to write anything hurtful about them. Morgan’s mom loves Bibi because she’s so feminine.
Morgan has become a leader in their new, queer home and community. Morgan is a radical activist, working from outside the mainstream as someone without a college or even high school degree in a world that makes it incredibly difficult for a person without formal, higher education to be successful. Against the odds, Morgan’s activism, which started with their one-person gender transformation and revolution, now exists on a large, truly world-changing scale. Still, Morgan has to carefully tread the line between activist and celebrity, making sure that fame doesn’t corrupt their political rebellion. While Morgan’s family has grown, too, her mother Julie still praises femininity and is more readily accepting of Bibi because her gender presents as traditionally feminine.
Themes
Morgan tweets a rave review for The Last Amazon of Dahomey that’s already racking up hundreds of likes and retweets. They finish off their wine and throw the glass into the Thames and are thinking about getting out of London first thing in the morning when they recognize Roland, the TV personality, standing next to a girl who’d stood out in the audience of one of their lectures last year. Morgan accepted the offer to lecture at the university to make some extra money. It was their first time ever in a university. They talked about their experience growing up and coming out as a trans person. Morgan remembers that Yazz, the girl now at the after party, was the only one in the audience that didn’t look at them like they were a “circus freak.”
In a move that parallels Amma’s choice to enter the mainstream by putting her play on at the National, Morgan, too, takes their radical politics into society’s preexisting institutions. Morgan shifts from radical to reformer when they decide to enter the university to give a lecture on gender, attempting to make change from within. Working from within society’s existing institutions also comes with financial benefits, but with that also comes the fear of selling out. Because of her progressive upbringing with two gay parents, Yazz is the only one in Morgan’s audience who isn’t judgmental.
Themes
The students were enthralled and Morgan revealed more personal details including their decision to get top surgery. During the Q&A Morgan was applauded for being brave and entertaining. Yazz rushed up to Morgan, and excitedly announced that she, too, might become non-binary by getting a trendy haircut. Morgan told her that being trans isn’t “playacting an identity,” but is “something inside you” that’s been there for a long time, not just something “woke” or “hip.” Yazz, flanked by her crew, convinced Morgan to grab a coffee with them. At the coffee shop Yazz and her friends were overeager to share their opinions on gender, “as if they were suddenly the experts.” At the National, Yazz spots Morgan and rushes over to talk to them, explaining that she’s Amma’s daughter. Morgan was about to leave, but Yazz insists they stay and takes them inside to find Waris and Courtney.
By the end of the lecture, the audience looks at Morgan with respect and admiration, speaking to the change Morgan’s work is making. Yazz and her friends, a few years younger than Morgan, represent the younger generation caught up in being woke and hip. Yazz wants to try queerness on with a haircut, while Morgan’s queerness isn’t a costume that they can take on and off. In being so desperate to demonstrate and prove their wokeness, whether through a haircut or their opinions, young people like Yazz and her friends can end up being the opposite of woke.
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