Playing Peter Pan Conceptua izing " Bois " in Contemporary Queer Theory

As a queer and gender-queer individual, my relationships to both lesbian as an identity and to Toronto's lesbian communities have been marked by a strangely productive ambiguity. While "coming out" as a lesbian was and continues to be empowering, I have become increasingly aware of my own emotional and intellectual tensions with respect to the signifier, "lesbian," as it purports to simultaneously describe and produce me. Noticing my developing affinities towards the city's various trans' communities, I began to imagine myself as tenuously located in the liminal spaces between "lesbian" and "transn-indeed, between "butch" and "boi." As such, in the midst of my undergraduate career at York University, I became keenly interested in the "boi" identity as it gained subcultural currency and began to shift the meanings that circulated around pre-existing identities such as lesbian, transgender, butch, and tranny-boy. I intend to interrogate the spaces which the term "boi" opens up for self-fashioning in contemporary North America's queer communities. The January 2004 edition of New York magazine includes an article by Ariel Levy ("Where the Bois Are") heralding the arrival of the "boinan identity andlor label being taken up by "femalen-bodied people in some lesbianldyke, queer, and genderqueer communities in urban North Arner i~a .~ The increasing visibility of gender-queer lives and politics, including the drag king cultures which are thriving in many urban centres, is just one of the historical conditions from which the boi emerges. Underlying this historical moment is acombination of theory and activism that has been carrying on the work of depathologizing gender "dysphoria," foregroundingthevarious eroticcombinations that constitute queer communities, and challengingwhat Gayle Rubin has termed the "'sexlgender system,' the system by which chromosomal sex is turned into, and processed as, cultural gender" (Sedgwick 28). Equally important is the cultural capital accruing to contemporary "boy culture." This is a culture marked by, among other things, the popularity of "boy bands," the recent explosion ofvideo game cultures and markets, and the resurgence of interest in comic books as cultural artifacts. The contours ofthis culture are not shaped by age, but by a plafil accessorizing that insists upon disSARAH TRIMBLE