2. Daily Agenda
 Terms list 4: The terms exam will be on the last class
day of the quarter. It will include a comprehensive
terms test, which will emphasize the new terms.
 Essay #5 will be an in-class essay exam on the last
class day of the quarter—topics to be discussed later
 Discussion:
 QHQ Helen Lock
 Trickster characters and approaches
 In-class Writing: Evaluating the Trickster Character

3. Terms for Exam 4: A Comprehensive Test
 Gender Identity: The sense of “being” male or “being” female. For some
people, gender identity is in accord with physical anatomy. For transgender
people, gender identity may differ from physical anatomy or expected social roles. It is
important to note that gender identity, biological sex, and sexual orientation are not
necessarily linked.
 Heterosexism: The concept that heterosexuality is natural, normal, superior and
required. A system of beliefs about the superiority of heterosexuals or heterosexuality
evidenced in the exclusion, by omission or design, of gay, lesbian and bisexual persons
in assumptions, communication, policies, procedures, events, or activities.
 Heterosexual: A person who is primarily and/or exclusively attracted to members of a
gender or sex that is seen to be “opposite” or other than the one with which they
identify or are identified.
 Homosexual: A person who is primarily and /or exclusively attracted to members of
what they identify as their own sex or gender. Because the term possesses
connotations of disease and abnormality, some people do not like to identify as
homosexual. Still others do not feel that it accurately defines their chosen identity.
 Lesbian: One who identifies as a woman who is primarily or exclusively attracted to
others who identify as women.

4. • Sex Reassignment (SRS): A surgical procedure that modifies one’s primary and/or
secondary sex characteristics. This process was formerly called a “sex change
operation,” a phrase now considered offensive.
• Sexual Orientation: A person’s emotional, physical and sexual attraction and the
expression of that attraction with other individuals. Some of the better-known labels
or categories include “bisexual,” “multisexual,” “pansexual,” “omnisexual,”
“lesbian,” “gay” (“homosexual” is a more clinical term), or “heterosexual.”
• Trans: Abbreviation for transgender, transsexual, or some other form of trans identity.
“Trans” can invoke notions of transcending beyond, existing between, or crossing
over borders.
• Transgender: An umbrella term used to describe people who do not fit into traditional
gender categories, including transsexuals, transvestites or cross-dressers, intersexuals
or hermaphrodites, and sometimes, even people who identify as butch or femme. Can
invoke notions of transcending beyond, existing between or crossing over borders.
• Transition: The period when one is changing from living as one sex or gender to a
different conception of sex or gender. Transitioning is complicated, multi-step process
that may include surgically and/or hormonally altering one’s body.

6. What are Tricksters?
1. What is Lock’s article about?
2. What is the purpose of a trickster?
3. What does trickster aim for?
4. What is the role of the trickster?
5. Why are there mostly male tricksters in myths?
6. Are all tricksters bad?
7. Are authors of trickster tales tricksters themselves?

7. The Attraction to/Fear of
Tricksters
1. Why are we intrigued by tricksters?
2. How can tricksters affect us?
3. How do we see through tricksters?
4. Should tricksters be welcomed?
5. How can we avoid tricksters in our own lives?

8. The Modern Trickster
1. How has the trickster evolved throughout history?
2. What differences in the human condition are there
between the ancient and contemporary tricksters?
(Such as today’s self-aware and self-reflective
trickster as opposed to the ancient unaware
trickster)

11. The Question
 Does the trickster perform fundamental cultural
work?
 In understanding the trickster better, do we better
understand ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious
aspects of ourselves that respond to the trickster’s
unsettling and transformative behavior?
 In understanding the trickster better, do we better
understand our limitations? Our culture? Our biases?
Or boundaries? Or something else?

12. Are there remnants of this early definition
of the trickster in our modern day
characters? Which?
 “Everywhere one looks among premodern peoples,
there are tricky mythical beings alike enough to
entice any human mind to create a category for
them once it had met two or three. They are beings
of the beginning, working in some complex
relationship with the High God; transformers,
helping to bring the present human world into
being; performers of heroic acts on behalf of men,
yet in their original form. or in some later form,
foolish, obscene, laughable, yet indomitable”
(Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 15).

13. Does this definition resonate with us
in terms of our modern trickster
characters? How?
 According to [Paul] Radin, for example,
“Trickster is at one and the same time creator
and destroyer, giver and negator, he who
dupes others and who is always duped himself.
. . . He possesses no values, moral or social, is at
the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet
through his actions all values come into being”
(xxiii).

14. Do we see our trickster characters
in this more contemporary
definition? Who?
 [The trickster] actually is immoral (or at least amoral) and
blasphemous and rebellious, and his interest in entering the
societal game is not to provide the safety-valve that makes it
tolerable, but to question, manipulate, and disrupt its rules. He
is the consummate mover of goalposts, constantly redrawing
the boundaries of the possible. In fact, the trickster suggests,
says Hyde, “a method by which a stranger or underling can
enter the game, change its rules, and win a piece of the
action” (204).

15. Can we revise this idea to
apply it to our texts or
characters?
 Not just any rogue or anti-hero can properly be termed a
trickster. The true trickster’s trickery calls into question
fundamental assumptions about the way the world is
organized, and reveals the possibility of transforming
them (even if often for ignoble ends). In this regard it is
not surprising that innovative uses have been made of
the modern incarnation of the trickster in American
novels produced by writers of dual ethnic or cultural
backgrounds, in whose worlds boundaries have
continually to be mediated and assumptions challenged..

16. Are our Characters
modern Tricksters? How
do we know?
 The self-reflexivity associated with the
[contemporary trickster] is absent in the ancient
“unconscious” trickster, like Wakdjunkaga, whose
hands fought each other and who was unaware that
his anus was part of his own body. The
contemporary trickster, by contrast, is largely self-
aware, unlike his/her archaic counterpart. “[T]he
pressures of experience produce from that
somewhat witless character a more sophisticated
trickster.”

17. A New Age of Tricksters?
Are they tricky? Or in
Earnest?
 [A] new age brings a transmutation and a new
repertoire of tricks. In fact, we may now have
reached the stage of ultimate ambiguity, where the
trickster’s self-awareness and self-reflexivity call into
question even what is a trick and what is in
earnest, or on what side of the boundary truth lies, if
indeed there are any more “sides” or any
unequivocal truths (Lock).

19. Homework
 Writing for Essay #4:
 Post your in-class writing
 Writing: Blog Prompt: Identify two characters from our reading who
share a common trait or traits. How are they alike? How might you use
them to create a single thesis that answers the essay 4 prompt?
 Consider these traits: Deceitful, Self-Serving, Cultural Hero, Shape Shifter, Solitary,
Weak (physically, intellectually, socially), Uses Special Tools, Teacher. There can
be other traits, so if you identify a common behavior or characteristic in two
tricksters, do not hesitate to explore the potential.
 Reading: Moraga "La Guera" and Far “Leaves from the Mental
Portfolio of an Eurasian”
 QHQ Sui Sin Far
 Studying: Terms from list 4