A "Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity": Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Blending in Thomas Pynchon's 'V.'

Published ten years after second of Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953). same year as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, two years before founding of NOW, and almost a decade before Gay Liberation Movement, Thomas Pynchon's (1963) stands at a pivotal moment in construction of modern American sexuality and role identification.(1) Although Mary Allen examined blankness of women in and aptly concluded that the variety of women in results from various fantasies of men(2) and Alice Jardine clearly showed that V. herself is nothing more than a `fetish-construction' . . . [that] Man will always search for, without ever knowing why,(3) neither study also considered way(s) in which Man, masculinity, and maleness are also social constructions that shape, and are shaped by, feminine. While I do not want to displace these earlier, specifically feminist, readings, I do hope to suggest that time is ripe to augment them. In other words, needs to be (re)read from vantage of its pervasive sexuality or treatment of roles and identification. Despite Hanjo Berressem's intriguing reading of fetish in through insights derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,(4) Pynchon's analysis of and directly owes little to sexology or psychoanalysis. After a pseudo-explanation of V.'s lesbianism in Paris toys with Freud's early (1911) concept of homosexuality as narcissism, Stencil summarily distances himself from this explanation by concluding, preferences lay outside usual, exogamous-heterosexual pattern which prevailed in 1913, insertion of merely suggesting, I think, his impatient disdain.(5) Such disdain reflects a 1950s discourse on and sexuality. For example, as late as 1976, David and Brannon in major review of sociological literature on differentiation found that they could locate no book then in print that specifically treated male role.(6) Looking back on his Cornell days, Pynchon himself commented that 1958 . . . was another planet. You have to appreciate extent of sexual repression on that campus at time.(7) Because he seems to have little or no formal underpinning for his v dews on role identity, we might find Pynchon's attitudes at times naive. uninformed, or even crude after impact of feminism, of male and gay liberation movements, and of Political Correctness, but in context of late 50s and early 60s they are both enlightened and radical. If he privileges phallocentricity, he ridicules assumption and arrogance of male domination; if he privileges male homosocial at expense of heterosocial bonding, and thus frequently seems to denigrate feminine, he avoids sorts of homophobia classically defined by Gregory Lehne as a characteristic of individuals who are generally rigid and sexist(8) or by Stephen Morin and Ellen Garfinkle as sort of fear that heterosexual men may have of their own sexual impulses toward men.(9) Despite Catherine Stimpson's early feminist confusion of homosexuality and sadism, a reading of by way of Norman Mailer,(10) his almost silent use of male homosexuality is shocking-even, I suggest, loud-when we place it against his structural use of gay bar in Lot 49 and anal sodomy in Gravity's Rainbow. Eve Sedgwick demarcates biological as chromosomal sex and meaning of gender as culturally mutable and variable, highly relational, . . . and inextricable from a history of power differential between gender.(11) In her textbook definition, Susan Basow simplifies that Sex is a biological term; people are termed either male or female depending on organs and genes. In contrast, is a psychological and cultural term, referring to one's subjective feelings of maleness or femaleness (gender identity).(12) At no point in do we question V.'s biological sex, though in V. …