The Performance of Gender and Race in James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird

In The Good Lord Bird, gender passing and performance of the protagonist, Onion, are presented as fluid and transparent. Performance, mobility, and constant change are themes throughout the novel. The dramatic narrative feeds off tensions arising from race and gender and the ways in which related identities are experienced and performed. The current paper examines factors relating to performativity and identity in terms of race; in the case of Onion’s narrative, these aspects of identity inform a specific kind of understanding of a social and geographical situation that requires subversion. Through humor and satire, McBride creates a powerful work with contemporary resonances. The drama of the novel is based on concepts of performativity and identity, and the understanding represented by the symbol of the “Good Lord” bird in the novel. McBride wrote the novel for a contemporary audience, knowing that they would be attuned to such issues surrounding racial performance and racial identity. In a way, the unusual literary depiction of a self-identified male who inhabits a female performed identity throughout the novel can be seen as McBride’s comment on the ridiculousness of a binary system of racial categorization as used since the slavery era. Drawing upon theories from Lacan, Butler and Bhabha, the current work examines the plurality and hybridity of performed identities in The Good Lord Bird as they relate to understanding.