ABSTRACT
David McInnes’s conceptual intervention has prompted in me distant recollections. I was called a “sissy” as a child, although I can’t remember who did the naming, and what exactly it was that I did, or didn’t do, in my “becoming sissy.” I do remember that I didn’t want to be one, and that my being a sissy came with another instruction: “Don’t be such a girl!” Looking back, I understand that my “becoming girl” involved a lot of hard work, and being the conscientious type (another kind of performance that no doubt worked in tandem with my “becoming girl”) I suspect that I’d worked overtime. There was a “too-muchness” to my becoming girl that meant I was in imminent danger of “becoming a sissy”—a kind of being, it seems, that no one really wants to see in little boys or girls.
