The one thing we never know about people when we meet them is their history, but the one thing we cannot help knowing, or assuming, is their sex. It is not clear, though, as common sense and psychoanalysis tell us, what we think we know, what we imagine the signs are telling us.
Garber wants us to wonder what our lives would look like without this project, without our endless concern about the categories of male and female. She wants to find out what we can do without, and what we might do then
Like Shakespeare’s Ghosts our identity is liminal, ethereal a 'thing' that appears but is yet not whole. Marjorie Garber suggests, that with the idea of fixed sexual identity, of being too knowingly male or female – terms, she remarks archly, ‘that overwhelmingly proclaim their own inadequacy’ – we may have got ourselves into something we are always trying to get out of. Indeed, what she calls the ‘pitfalls of gender assignment’
Most 0f 0ur erotic attachments are to our categories. That we hold ourselves together by keeping apart from say people of uncertain status.
We have turned identity into the indispensable preoccupation that keeps us and gets us going?
If we lost our identity it might be disillusionments we might not be able to bear some things we are unable to mourn. Mourning is painful not only because it is an acknowledgment of loss, but because it confronts us with the knowledge that we never were the possessors of what we have lost, but rather, the inventors.
l about people of uncertain status, ghosts as liminal creatures that confuse categories – asked why we need to hold on to Shakespeare, why he has such a grip on our imaginations. Vested Interest asks, as an echo, why we have made a fet
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