Seattle University Mcbees Amateur Book Reading Essay

I’m studying for my Writing class and need an explanation.

Instructions:

Use this Discussion Board to work through thoughts, reactions, and questions in informal, low-stakes writing as you read Amateur. In your posts (due by Monday at midnight), you may find that you raise more questions than you answer in these posts. You’ll also find that your classmates’ ideas and interpretations can serve as catalysts for your own analysis later in your own Body Stories.

Your posts should be 300 words minimum and should close-read a passage (or passages) from the memoir and from a theoretical essay (or essays); begin to “put them in conversation” as you did for your Short Analysis Essay.

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Here is another students post about mcbee’s Amateur book please respond to it and agree and also add quotes from it and formulate your own thoughts on it as well. This is the grading rubric to follow as well.

There are many parallels between McBee’s experiences and Du Bois’ lived reality and Seibers’ theories. Being trans, experiencing being both female and male, has afforded McBee special insight and empathy. Du Bois called this “double-consciousness” and “second-sight” and reflected that having two identities gifted him with abilities in “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (p. 3). He inevitably chose to live in the Veil because he valued those hard-won gifts that the Veil afforded him. From my Short Analysis Essay I wrote: “Second-sight, after all, afforded him the ability to create and find connection with other human beings whose bonds were inextricably linked by the ‘deeper recesses’ and the common cord of ‘struggle’ and ‘human sorrow’ [suffering].”

The “gift” of second-sight in action is seen when McBee has an interaction with women at work, recognizing that they are deemed invisible simply for being women, and later with Larissa, his female sparring partner, whom he was initially afraid to fail around (to pass among his fellow male boxers). McBee views Larissa with empathy that without second-sight, may not have available to him, or at least to this degree. He recognizes that, by benefitting from being a male, he has inadvertently become sexist. In that moment with Larissa, rather than feel the need to compete with her, he is compelled instead to relate to her. He writes, “Errol put Larissa and me in the ring again. This time, I no longer felt ashamed, even after somebody hooted…I saw in her the women I worked with, Jess, my mother, my sister. I saw myself Before, the person I wished I’d been regardless of the body I had. The person I wished I were now…We touched gloves, and I felt a rush of affection for her as the bell rang” (p. 56). To the degree McBee faced “ugly” truths (p. 49), embraced himself, his identities and “shadow” (p. 20), he embraced and empathized with others.

Siebers (1997) posits that “[O]ppressed social locations create identities and perspectives, embodiments and feelings, histories and experiences that stand outside of and offer valuable knowledge about the powerful ideologies that seem to enclose us” (p. 312). Using second-sight, McBee could not only empathize with other human beings, but he could also question the margins of the man box (p. 42), or what Siebers describes as “the invisible center around which our contradictory ideology about human ability revolves” (p. 273). None of this came easily or naturally to McBee, as he wrestled with the circulating ideas and narratives surrounding what it meant to be a man. “Do not let your self be dominated. Do not apologize when you are the one inconvenienced. Do not make your body smaller. Do not smile at strangers. Do not show weakness” (p. 41). Examination of the ideologies regarding manhood was a process, as was finding his place in the world. But it helped McBee to be able to approach it from within the lenses of multiple identities. Second-sight.

Meanwhile, being trans for McBee does not necessarily mean that he lives “between worlds” as outlined by some of the theorists. He explains, “If anything, it has just created with me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow” (McBee, 2018, p. 110).