The real possibility of joy: an interview with Josephine Emery
August 18, 2009 – 8:03 am, by LiteraryMinded
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded/2009/08/18/the-real-possibility-of-joy-an-interview-with-josephine-emery/Josephine Emery's The Real Possibility of Joy: A Personal Journey From Man to Woman is released in September from Pier 9. It's a compelling, poignant, fascinating, honest memoir. And as a writer, screenwriter and former director of the literature board at the Australia Council for the Arts, Josephine Emery really knows how to write. I reviewed the book in the September issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine, but I was keen to ask Josephine a few questions about the book, her journey and herself.
In your travels, you have come across cultures that are more accepting of gender flexibility, or change, such as in Tahiti. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
All across the Pacific and Indian Oceans – from the Pacific coast of the Americas through Hawaii, Polynesia, Oceania, Asia and India there are well-determined cultural roles for those of us caught within the trap of gender. Some of those roles are very restrictive: they are cultural traps in themselves. But they do demonstrate a worldwide historical and cultural continuity of having to deal with people born with this difference between perceived self and 'true self'. Many of those living in such roles were systematically eliminated by invaders. Christianity and Islam never took comfortably to the idea of gender variance! Before I came across these stories I was fascinated by Tiresias in the Greek plays: who went from male to female and back again. That's gender fluidity for you! And that's another example of the embedded historical evidence for the awareness of gender variance.
