The daily agenda document outlines the class plan which includes a terms exam on gender identity terms, a discussion on trickster characters from readings, and an in-class essay. It also provides definitions for 14 key terms related to gender identity that will be covered on the exam such as gender identity, heterosexism, and transgender. The document raises questions about how trickster characters perform cultural work and how understanding them can provide insight into human limitations, culture, and biases. It explores definitions of the trickster from different scholars and debates whether modern characters fulfill these definitions. The homework is to identify common traits in two trickster characters and use them in a thesis for the essay.

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.)
 Discussion: Trickster Characters from our reading
In-class writing: Essay 4

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.

7. 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?

8. 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).

9. 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).

10. 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).

11. 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..

12. 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.”

13. 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).

15. Homework
 Post #26: 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: Sui Sin Far “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio
of an Eurasian”
 Post #27: QHQ Sui Sin Far
 Studying: Terms from list 4