“The Virgin is one tricky lady. You never know when or where she’s gonna show up next. So be on your fuckin’ guard at all times” (119).

Fruit (AKA The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington: A Novel)

--This is such a character driven novel - how is that different than other novels we have read? --What do we do with Daniela? --Uncle Ed? --Nancy and Christine? --mom and dad? --What do we do with the image of the [male] nipples? --What is the role of Christianity (Catholicism in particular)? --How is an ethnic identity portrayed differently and similarly to Middlesex? --What kind of body is Peter’s? --What’s with the title change?

Is fatness a disability?

“ [B]oth fatness and deafness continue to be represented as mutable and ideally curable despite the mixed outcomes of medical technologies designed for carrying out the task. ”

“ Thus, the stigma and pathology surrounding both fat and disabled people are conceived around the notion that both are cohesive groups. ” “ Disparate But Disabled Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies” by April Herndon. Feminist Formations 14:3, Fall (2002).

“ Resistance to seeing fatness as a disability and fat people as a politicized group situates itself within medical epistemological frameworks that focus mostly on the biology of individuals. In a striking comparison between the politics of the supposed biological categories of race and disability, Wendell states that ‘ the belief that ‘ the disabled ’ is a biological category is like the belief that ‘ Black ’ is a biological category in that it masks the social functions and injustices that underlie the assignment of people to these groups ’” (24).

“ Recounting familiar narratives of fatness as a voluntary condition resulting from poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle and of disabled people as dangerous to the American purse because accommodation must be suffered by the public writ large, the episode stripped the issues down to elemental fears of Otherness. ‘ King Size Homer ’ underscored the role of volition in dominant understandings of both fatness and disability. ”

Peter wants a boyfriend and his mom wants one for him, too (62).

How are gay teens most often represented?

“And indeed, books about gay male teenagers superficially seem to promise the reader freedom from past constraints, freedom from continued repression, freedom from narrow- minded discourse—but simultaneously, such books often undermine that alleged liberation, as if the very existence of the genre gay YA literature depended on repression. And indeed, the existence of the genre very well may depend on this double-voicedness, for mainstream YA publishing still acts as if it were threatened by the idea of homosexuality. As a result, in gay young adult literature, homosexuality seems at once enunciated and repressed.”

“…are very Foucauldian in their tendency to privilege the discourse of homosexuality over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality more rhetorically than physically.”

“ Foucault's The History of Sexuality demonstrates that simultaneously repressing and liberating sexuality is central to the ways that Western cultures define themselves. He suggests that far from being on the verge of being liberated by discourses of sexuality, Western cultures are dependent on a definition of sexuality as repressed. Western discourses about sex are repressed, he argues, because any number of institutions … have gone to ingenious lengths to create monumental rhetorical systems … that depend on people talking about sex. The result is a social obsession with sexuality: ‘ What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret ’ ( History 35). ”

The cussing girl! (pg 115)

--This is such a character driven novel - how is that different than other novels we have read? --What do we do with Daniela? --Uncle Ed? --Nancy and Christine? --mom and dad? --What do we do with the image of the [male] nipples? --What is the role of Christianity (Catholicism in particular [pg10])? --How is an ethnic identity portrayed differently and similarly to Middlesex (pg 48)? --What kind of body is Peter’s? --What’s with the title change?

Last page: “Everyone will see the fruit I am trying to hide.”