As children we are taught to colour within the lines. We are told that we must keep the colours within bounded spaces to see a coherent world emerge in our colouring books. A brown tree trunk emerges, holding together green foliage. Beneath the tree is also an expanse of green: grass. There is a house on this grass: with red walls, yellow windows and a brown door. Floating above this house are white clouds, and engulfing them is an expanse of blue: the sky. When colours spill across, when a little bit of the red house-paint spills into the blue sky, or the brown door seems to meld in with the green grass, we see \u2018errors\u2019 that must be corrected in another attempt to preserve the perfect order of that emergent world.\u00a0If the child continues to colour outside the lines, she is simply not good enough. If she doesn\u2019t care too much for the lines, and imagines over the landscape on the colouring book a landscape of her own making, we are tempted to punish her. I know children who have had their knuckles rapped for such \u2018insolence\u2019.<\/p>\n
In this article, I explore this insolence \u2013 this spilling across the lines \u2013 as an act that invites thinking. After all, it is in these moments of transgression that we become aware of the boundaries. Some of us, of course, have become good at staying within these lines. We might even like them, find them comfortable. But some of us haven\u2019t quite mastered the art. Try as we might, we find our hands taking that stroke a little too far. Before we know it, the yellow windows bleed into the red walls, and that into the blue sky, upsetting a sense of order and allowing a different world \u2013 a forbidden one \u2013 to emerge. This emergence, unwitting as it might have been, threatens the hegemony of everything we know to be \u2018right\u2019. And in these unintentional moments of transgression, two things become obvious: first that it is possible<\/em> to colour beyond the lines, and secondly, that there is no real \u2018wrong\u2019 image \u2013 there are just different ones.<\/p>\n Of course, all this is easier said than done, considering there are raps on the knuckles waiting for those who transgress. Or worse.<\/p>\n Take Caster Semenya, an athlete from South Africa. In 2009, she won a gold in the women\u2019s 800m at the International Association of Athletics Federation. Immediately, the IAAF began to get questions: curious people wanted to know<\/a> if Caster really was a woman<\/a>. Their argument was that she was too fast, too masculine to be one. In her case, it was her body that spilled across a boundary \u2013 a gender boundary that decides how manly a man should look, how feminine a woman, and what work their bodies are capable of doing (or not). Caster\u2019s body crossed this line, and emerged on the wrong side to some spectators of the sport. The ruckus was enough to keep her from<\/a> claiming her award \u2013 and perhaps from competing in the women\u2019s category \u2013 until she could be made to emerge on the right side of the line. The IAAF never revealed what tests she was subjected to, and never released an official report on her gender, but leaks in the media offered details of what her many bodily transgressions might be: her testosterone levels were too high, she had no ovaries or uterus, she had both male and female organs. How would the IAAF make sense of this transgression? Was she man? Was she woman? What would be the \u2018right\u2019 category?<\/p>\n After being subjected to an ordeal \u2013 a series of medical tests and months of media scrutiny \u2013 Caster was \u2018allowed\u2019 to compete as a woman. However, it was not necessarily the same gendered category she had herself claimed many months ago. When Caster had registered herself as a woman, she had embodied a category of women who could run as fast as she did and could have a muscular, androgynous body like hers. But that notion of \u2018woman\u2019 had spilled across more popular normative borders and challenged more hegemonic imageries of \u2018male\u2019 and \u2018female\u2019. Caster\u2019s body had not emerged on one side of this normative line: it had embodied traits on either side, and had emerged a little bit on each side, or perhaps even between them, occupying a space that neither category could fully define. So her body had to be denied the right to claim the category of \u2018woman\u2019 that she had used, and had to be tamed, studied, and re-classified \u2013 again as \u2018woman\u2019, but on someone else\u2019s terms.<\/p>\n