"It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth"
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Hawkes takes a supposedly practical question - is the ship or airplane “male or female”? - and turns it into a sly diagnosis of how language keeps trying to staple bodies onto machines. The parenthetical shrug, “they’re all the same, I’m convinced,” is doing double work: it collapses two icons of modern mobility into one interchangeable object, and it punctures the confidence we’re meant to have in tidy categories. If a ship and an airplane can be “all the same,” then the gendering of them starts to look like pure narrative habit, not truth.
The line’s real bite is in “it may shift back and forth.” Hawkes doesn’t argue for neutrality so much as he smuggles in instability. Gender here is a grammatical costume the object can change, depending on who’s speaking, what tradition they’re borrowing (the old “she” for ships), or what fantasy they’re projecting (sleek, phallic aircraft; nurturing, containing vessels). The uncertainty isn’t a bug; it’s the point. Modern technology becomes a mirror for modern identity: mobile, re-described midstream, resistant to fixed pronouns.
As a novelist associated with postwar experimental fiction, Hawkes is also winking at the reader’s desire to anchor meaning. In his work, surfaces slide, metaphors misbehave, categories melt. This single sentence performs that aesthetic: it tempts you with classification, then quietly shows how arbitrary the need to classify can be.
The line’s real bite is in “it may shift back and forth.” Hawkes doesn’t argue for neutrality so much as he smuggles in instability. Gender here is a grammatical costume the object can change, depending on who’s speaking, what tradition they’re borrowing (the old “she” for ships), or what fantasy they’re projecting (sleek, phallic aircraft; nurturing, containing vessels). The uncertainty isn’t a bug; it’s the point. Modern technology becomes a mirror for modern identity: mobile, re-described midstream, resistant to fixed pronouns.
As a novelist associated with postwar experimental fiction, Hawkes is also winking at the reader’s desire to anchor meaning. In his work, surfaces slide, metaphors misbehave, categories melt. This single sentence performs that aesthetic: it tempts you with classification, then quietly shows how arbitrary the need to classify can be.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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