Dancing In and Out of the Body: the Production of Identity in Mark Doty’s Firebird Anonymous 12th Grade

In his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall argues that “identity is not as transparent or as unproblematic as we think.” He goes on to suggest that we “think… of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always contained within, not outside, representation” (Hall 222). In poet Mark Doty’s Firebird: a memoir, this argument is strongly supported as young Mark learns about his own desires, learns to understand that they are considered wrong by the society around him, and alternately divorces himself from and throws himself madly into his physical being - his own body - throughout his youth and young adulthood. As a passionate artist, he cannot remain alienated from his physical self for long, but each trauma visited on his body and his desire, which seem somehow to be wrongly formed, sends him back into hiding - into wishing he were not. This escalates with drug abuse and a suicide attempt and culminates in his mother’s attempt to murder him, a trauma in which he feels he has left his body completely and is “halfway to the next life already and good riddance to this one” (177). As the story leaves this scene to jump into the last section of the text, recounting Doty’s continued...