Gender Roles in Soldier

     In Soldier, June Jordan discusses many topics that impacted her growing up as a child in New York City. However, the topics of gender roles and her upbringing's conflict with gender roles really stuck out to me. Her use of gender identification was fluid throughout the whole piece, both when interacting with her father and when referring to stereotypical gender roles. I also am unaware of whether or not June Jordan identified as female and/or gender neutral, so please correct me if you know more about Jordan's preferred gender identification.

     Jordan's father wanted to have a son to fulfill his dream of having the ultimate child. However, instead of a son, Jordan was born instead. Regardless of Jordan's assigned/self-identified gender, Jordan's father, Granville, raised her like a son, to fulfill Granville's dreams. Jordan states that "[m]aybe I should have been born a boy. I think I dumbfounded my father" (Jordan 18), and this passage continues on so the readers can see that Granville, despite Jordan's gender, still aiming to have his child overcome obstacles to rise to the top. However, instead of accepting Jordan as his daughter, Granville often refers to Jordan as "boy" and "son", which erases from his mind that Jordan is female.

    An interesting aspect of this memoir is that Jordan's parents both differ in the treatment and expectations of their child. Jordan's mother identifies Jordan as her daughter and is frustrated at Granville's aspirations and how he treats Jordan as a male. In contrast, Granville almost completely erases Jordan's feminine identity, even when she is dressed in stereotypically feminine clothing, and refers to her as "boy" and uses "he/him" pronouns. Jordan herself slips into masculine identification at times when interacting with her father, at one point stating "for whatever reason, my father and I never had a man-to-man conversation about sex" (112), and before, whenever Jordan speaks about her relationships or thought processes about sex and boys, she refers to herself as a girl.

    There is an interesting passage where Jordan subtly inserts herself in the male side of the gendered binary she is used to. Jordan states "I never hit her back. She was my mother. And she was like a girl" (135-136), and this is particularly interesting because in earlier passages, Jordan identified herself as a girl albeit saying she was "not like the other girls" in a sense. However, in this passage, Jordan is saying she would never hit her mother back because her mother is "-like a girl" (136), and that is interesting because Jordan has been involved in fights with girls before. In saying that she would never hit her mother because she was a woman, Jordan is sub-consciously or perhaps, consciously, grouping herself with the males in her life, who are not supposed to hit women and girls due to a code they have. And this passage is made even more interesting as Jordan takes on a violent role with her father. Jordan states "but with my father, the beating turned into a fight between us" (136), and by saying that the fight was "-between us" (136), Jordan is signaling to the readers that she was as directly involved in the fight as her father was, and while she didn't hit her mother because of a code she followed, her violence towards her father can be associated with masculinity.

   Jordan was often treated differently from others in her social circle based on how she acted. Jordan, influenced by how her father treated her like a son, acted more stereotypically masculine while still identifying as a girl. This led to her being an outsider among the children in her neighborhood, not in that she could not play with them, but rather that she recognized the differences between girls and boys earlier on- or at least how Jordan's culture brought her up to recognize differences between girls and boys. Her tomboy nature was mentioned a lot, by family members and by outside parties. Jordan states that "people used to say I was a brave little girl or that I was brave like a boy- a lot" (213) and for an impressionable child like Jordan to be told constantly that she was "like a boy" (213), it would make a strong impact on her ideas about gender roles.

  A passage that I thought was particularly telling of Jordan's opinions on gender roles and gendered behavior was one of the scenes where she was at camp. Jordan states that "-it was clear that everybody at camp was not a girl" (232) and this is an interesting statement because Jordan says in an earlier passage that the camp she is at is full of girls only, so why would she say that not everybody was a girl? On page 232, Jordan refers to a list of stereotypical "girly" behavior that proves, in her mind, why girls are not good campers. However, even though she is a girl, Jordan does not see herself as one of the "girl campers" because she likes camping and doing stuff that is not seen as "girly". She states, "it's not that the rest of us were boys. But we were not "girls", either" (233), and this is yet another indication of Jordan's perceptions of gender roles and how they relate to her. She acknowledges with the quotation marks around the word girls that she and her friends are not like the girls who do not enjoy non-girly stuff. She also acknowledges that she is not a boy, despite having been raised and treated like one by her father, other family members, and outsiders. She creates a new category for her and her friends, one that takes and rejects aspects of gender and gender roles that her culture has laid out for her.

Best,
Dani Rubinstein-Towler