Gender Performance in Jim Shepard’s “Minotaur”

Abstract

In a 2008 conversation in the Mississippi Review, Jim Shepard self-reports, “My stuff is strange enough that it’s often not mainstream” (202). About a half of a year later, he published “Minotaur” in Playboy. In 2011, Richard Ford anthologized the story in Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, classifying the text with others composed by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff.1 In that same year, the story was also included in Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad. However, reviewers overlook the work’s innovative treatment of cognitive dissonance, generally attributing the nameless narrator’s psychological conflict to marital insecurities related to his defense industry job.2 Actually, the narrator’s dilemma is caused by his misinterpretation of gender performance, specifically his miscalculation of masculine roles within two significant relationships. At the aptly called Windsock, the narrator gauges the authority of masculinity performed during his close friendship with Kenny against that practiced in his marriage with Carly. Over the course of the story, the narrator succumbs to heterosexual masculinity, rejecting the overtones of homosexuality affiliated with ritualistic male bonding. The narrator’s self-assessment of masculine performance is initiated by the unexpected meeting of Kenny and Carly, an occurrence prompting his eventual self-knowledge. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler provides her famous declaration that “gender proves to be performative,” contending gender identity depends upon contextualized actions, “always a doing” (25). She also points out that masculinity is defined by its binary opposition to femininity, and understanding masculinity is “accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire” (23). In other words, masculinity is established through actions responding to institutionalized heterosexuality. In “Minotaur,” the narrator basically scrutinizes his masculine performances in distinctively homosexual and heterosexual intimacies. Arguably, the narrator would reject any inference of homosexual desire for Kenny, yielding to what Butler calls “compulsory heterosexuality” (19). Nevertheless, the narrator’s descriptions of Kenny https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892