EDITOR'S NOTE:
The following is a longer version of story that appears in the print version of this week's Reporter. The story in the print version, while still comprehensive, had to be edited due to space limitations.

Gender-Bender

Controversial author to appear at UB

But the assistant professor at Kent State University is also the author of some of the most daring and playful fiction in contemporary American literature.

He has become the recent target of congressional criticism because of allegations that his work, an exploration of gender-shifting through language, is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and offers proof that funding should be ended for the NEA. The Black Ice Collective, which publishes his work, denies claims that Rice's controversial publications are funded thought its NEA grant.

Nevertheless, his situation underscores how artists-who by definition work the cultural margins-pose a danger to mainstream conceptions of reality.

The whole thing is nuts, Rice said. "We need the NEA. Without the NEA I'd never have read Ray Federman."

Rice-the Ohio family man and gender-bender-will present a reading and multi-video performance of his work-in which he says he "will turn into a woman" on-stage-at UB this month. The performance, which incorporates a reading and presentations on three video screens, is titled "On Eating Blood: And Becoming Flesh." It will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, in the Screening Room of the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Sub-Board I, Inc.; the Melodia Jones Chair in Modern Languages and Literatures (Raymond Federman), and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Although he's spent years in the academic trenches, Rice is a relatively new published writer whose recent novel, a gender-bender titled "Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest," has been described as an "incestuous smear of genderlessness and hormonal confusion."

Rice agrees. "God forced me to write this book," he said. "And I say this without any sort of hip postmodern, avant pop, ironic pose." As a matter of fact, Rice said, he almost became a Catholic priest.

"Mugwump" offers a witty narrative, fluid in form and engaging to read considering that the author tends to liken human activity to the movement of sludge or the flow of mucus. Things and people flow in and out of one another and morph playfully, weirdly, dangerously, in a lyrical and carefully observed dance that sometimes turns cryptic, sometimes poetic, sometimes into a high-modern raunch romp.

In his Mugwump world, boys have female genitalia and girls have male genitalia and characters seem to be universally caught up in a wide variety of physical and mental abuse. If misery, giggling, self-examination and utter queerness describe the human condition, they have come to full flower in Rice's prose. It brings Joycean style together with Duchamps' Dadaist sensibilities for a giddy ride into the fun house of the gendered self.

Rice and many others of his literary generation are emboldened by the postmodern urge to divest us of the notion that words have discrete and universal meanings. Writing in what some call the "twilight of postmodernism," some of them, like Rice, consider body parts, body processes and language to be related entities forged in an ancient crucible.

Rice describes his own work as "words on top of flesh on top of words until you end up writing the anti-logos." Instead of being an act that produces "meaning," reading becomes a creative act as your own meanings, references, memory-links kick in, set off by the author's references.

His work , he explains, operates against the notion of "reason" as the controlling principle of the universe. "Reason-as-order," born of the Greek Platonism and with us ever since, is held by Rice to be one of Western culture's most fondly held conceits.

"My book is written in language that speaks not out of "reason" but out of the silence of desire," he said. "I don't know how anyone can say 'I am male' or 'I am female' without acknowledging the flux we all experience between these two culturally defined poles-that is, if we aren't completely denying our erotic and physical desires.

"Our identities shift all the time," he said. "We aren't one thing or the other, even in terms of our gendered selves. I may be a man, but I am not only what is defined as 'masculine' and I don't desire only what is defined as 'feminine,' although I 'am' feminine, too.

"So what if you're a late market capitalist man who wants to explore how it feels to be feminine, to find out what's feminine about you, how you would 'be' feminine if you were expressing whatever is 'your' femininity?

"Well, you can have a sex-change operation, I suppose," he said, "but if you don't want to cut things off and have implants; if you think that maybe femininity is part and parcel of humanity, male or female, and you just want to experience it in some way and experience how and what you 'desire' in this state..." Rice paused. "There's fetishism, too, I suppose. That's a way..."

"Women who want to push against cultural forms of femininity can do what Leslie Haywood does."

Writer Haywood, a faculty member at Binghamton University, performed at UB last semester. A body-builder, she actually redefines her flesh, pushing her body through a different type of narrative.

"But I am a male and I want to 'alter' my body that way to adjust to what my desire is," Rice said. "I want to explore what my idea and only my idea of femininity is, and I don't want to have to change my body through surgery to correspond to my desires. So I work this through in language. I bring my language with me into these other realms. I dig into my flesh with language. I use it to explore my sex, my masculinity and my desire.

"When you deal with disturbances in the field of desire, it involves disturbances with memory and in philosophy and literary history, of course, and all that is in my writing."

"The self," he continues, "is disturbed by such use of language, but the self can never be free of bodies, of fluids, of desire. Language keeps re-attaching itself to the body in ways that confuses the signifier. It's like putting blood on the page."

As scary as this practice is for certain of the congressional delegation, Rice has his champions in the scholarly community.

Maria Elena Gutiérrez, assistant professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, is delighted with the way in which Rice "does" language.

"He approaches these issues from such a playful perspective," she said. "He's brilliant in that he explores these notions of subject, language and desire the way French theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous do this. But he shatters, blurs and displaces these notions through parody. It's very interesting. And quite funny."