Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Which Side Are You On? : Prosthetic Vaginas, Cross-Dressing Madonnas, And Queer Theology In Virgin Of The Flames And Narcopolis, Nasreen Hannah Khan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Chris Abani describes a scene where his main character Black and Sweet Girl, a transsexual dancer, have intercourse for the first time. Black hesitates as he begins to penetrate her anally because, “he couldn’t become her this way. He knew this thing, this intimacy he craved wasn’t about love, or even sex, but about filling himself.” (275). Black does not want sex, he wants, as Sweet Girl does, to transcend boundaries of gender and the physical dimensions of sex. Similarly Thayil’s narrator Dimple, a castrated biological male prostitute living as a woman, expounds on the nature of sex after a …