"The Changeling" by Judith Ortiz Cofer

In “The Changeling”, the reader develops empathy about how the speaker suffers due to the gender roles attributed to women in a male-dominated society. Feeling quite distanced from her parents, the speaker does not think that her family respects her as an individual. Thus, she transforms herself into a funny boy. However, the speaker feels invisible both in her family and in a patriarchal society anyway. Therefore, she especially tries to amuse her father who is the domineering figure in the family as well as in the society.

Although the father shows sympathy and smiles at his daughter’s transformation, the mother does not like her daughter’s amusement at all and invites her back to the kitchen. As women are associated with such domestic affairs as cooking and cleaning, the mother “belongs to the kitchen” unlike the speaker who does not have the same characteristic features of an ideal woman of that time.

In the poem, the speaker uses such words as “helmet” and “Ché” to emphasize the difference between men and women because men are expected to be engaged in business, war, and politics, and they are also the providers of the family. Being different from her mother, the speaker wants to challenge the typical roles that women have in society as young girls. The poem, in this sense, treats the theme of gender roles from the point of view of a young girl. For instance, unlike her brother, the speaker seeks for attention and tries to be seen. The reason why she wants to draw attention is that the speaker, as a child, understands that male figures, even boys, are not limited but she is. Therefore, she puts on her brother’s dungarees that can be taken as work clothes symbolizing men as workers, and from the word “strutting”, it is understood that she is proud of being a boy.