Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy, which was awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies by the National Communication Association.
Scott-Pollock applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety, with the following results:
From page 99:Learn more about Stories of Raising Boys at the Temple University Press website.…costume for Theo, and luckily, he loves it. Vinny walks tall and regal. Nico holds my hand tightly, careful as he looks up at me with big, dark eyes.Page 99 ends chapter 3, so there isn’t a whole page of text. Still, it gives the reader a glimpse into my book. It mentions three of my boys and draws on the metaphor of swimming through the ocean that I use to explain what it means to navigate the world as parents of boys that are both privileged by being born into a white, middle-class family, with engaged, educated parents who advocate for them, and who are marginalized because of their disability, gender identity, and/or anxiety in an ableist, patriarchal culture. It also reveals the book's overall structure, which is organized so that each child has their own chapter.
“You’re so beautiful, Nico.”
He looks away with a smile, and I think about how his gender-expansive swim differs from Vinny’s, which carefully and strategically chooses exclusively feminine strokes. Nico seems to have inherited my anxiety, according to our pediatrician, and treads water carefully between binary gender streams even though he seems to be the happiest in ultrafeminine attire. The next chapter is the story of our second gender-expansive boy’s anxious swim.
I would be disappointed if a reader only opened to this page because they can’t know the context of Theo, Vinny, and Nico having makeovers at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique on a Disney Cruise a few pages earlier and how their Fairy Godfather explained that Disney knows that being a princess is an aura and mindset that has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. A reader might think the entire book is about gender-expansive sons because most of the central characters are missing. Theo, one of my two conventionally masculine sons, is only mentioned in a fragment of a sentence. My big, powerful, and emotionally exhausted oldest son, Tony, who has frequent, uncontrolled seizures, and their baby sister Rosalie are also not on page 99. From just this section, readers also wouldn’t know that I am physically disabled, and know social stigma in ways their dad, who has always been an athletic, smart, tall, conventionally attractive man, cannot quite access, despite his empathetic and protective spirit.
I worry that, based on just page 99, readers would not realize this book is not a memoir. It is an autoethnography that examines the power structures of society through the stories we choose to tell from the cultural locations we occupy and the bodies we’re in. From just this page, readers won’t know that my stories of raising boys are approved by them and deepened through interweaving interviews with adults who also live with seizures, are gender expansive, and/or are diagnosed with anxiety. Page 99 does not reveal that this book is a story of raising boys at the cultural intersections of masculinity and an analysis that offers hope for inclusive, safe swims for all bodies through culture.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
