Study Questions on Excerpt from “On Sex and Gender” chapter in Tomson Highway’s Laughing with the

Trickster
1. What would you say is the point that Highway is making about the influence of Western culture on the way
we think about sex and gender today? How has language contributed to that kind of thinking in his view?
2. How does Highway relate his analysis of sex and gender to power hierarchies and, by extension, violence?
3. What makes Indigenous perspectives on sex and gender, including the examples presented by Highway on
his own Cree culture, different from those of Western perspectives?
4. How much do you agree or disagree with Highway’s analysis? Why?
Study Questions on Kai Cheng Thom’s “When Is a Woman?”
1. Why do you think Thom uses the Sojourner Truth quotation to introduce her poem? How does it help frame
the poem?
2. Why do you think the speaker of the poem begins by listing his mother’s expectations of him? What
impression do you have of the mother and her relationship with her son due to this list? How would you say
this beginning sets up the mother’s “role” in the rest of the poem? How would you say the mother is being
“used” (i.e., as a literary device) by the speaker?
3. What kind of comparisons do you believe the speaker is making between himself and his mother? What do
you think is the purpose of these comparisons? How would you say their Chinese background factors into
these comparisons?
4. Why do you think the speaker poses him question as “When Is a Woman?” rather than as “who” or “what”?
Comparative Study Questions
1. In considering the references to ethno-racialized identities in their respective texts, how would you compare
the complexities that Thom and Highway present for gender-diverse IBPOC in their experiences of/views on
gender while living in a White Western context?
2. What comparisons can you make between both works in the ways they highlight the contribution of White
European culture to the creation of gendered power dynamics?