Re/articulating Identity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet

Abstract

Jackie Kay's first novel, Trumpet (1998), fictionalizes the story of Joss Moody, a black Scottish trumpet player found to be biologically female on his death after having lived his whole life as a man. It is my contention that, by accounting for the life of a character that is the epitome of hyphenation and indeterminacy – Joss is a black-Scottish-female/male-trumpet player – Trumpet explores and destabilizes the dynamics of identity formation and the social and spatial construction of gender identity and becomes an example of the ways in which identity is permanently (re)created to offer alternative conceptions of the self. I shall study how Trumpet is poignant about the fluidity of identity and the role that the public/private dichotomous divisions of space have in the process of articulating and re-inventing one’s identity. I shall analyse fluidity of identity, taking into consideration Joss’s identity formation process by drawing on the dichotomy bodily reality versus embodied performance and following Judith Butler’s views on performativity. This paper centres, as well, on the significance of space in the process of creating and maintaining a gender identity across and within the public and the private domains since, as I shall argue, the private/public dichotomy offers Joss and, his wife, Millie, the possibility of creating subversive identities.