| Title | : | Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0231109350 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780231109352 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1998 |
In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality. His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought.
The form and approach of "Second Skins" works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals--poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.
Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality Reviews
-
Good to revisit a major contribution to this field, just over twenty years after it was published. I still find the reliance on Freud in some feminist and queer work, cited here, annoying (and still wonder what would happen if the same scholars started from, say, Wittgenstein instead. I would!). Prosser's own work is useful although the discussion and terminology has moved on considerably. His analysis of The Well of Loneliness is convincing, the chapter on Stone Butch Blues is interesting but feels the absence of the term 'nonbinary', and the concluding analysis which uses photographs as the source material seems to me to be standing up well to the test of time.
-
If you are going to change your gender from that assigned at birth then you wind up having to explain yourself to doctors and therapists, to friends and family, employers, people you encounter. You will be rummaging through your biographical memory to put the narrative together to tell people why you need to grow your hair long, why you want to wear these clothes, why you need hormones, why you need surgery, why you are changing your name why you are a different gender than people have known you to be all this time. You have to reach in and come up with the narrative vocabulary as to why you are doing this. This book was written in the nineties when transgender folks were less known than now. The script is better known and more people can find the story. But the narrative arc is still a big part of how we change and get society to accept us. The author goes over the history of transgender politics and how people are putting into narrative form this need to be themselves and have it written on their bodies. Old work from the nineties and a little too much into the postmodern turn of the time but narrative arcs are important.
-
read intro through ch 2
-
Prosser reads transsexuality through autobiographies. The first part of the book argues for a materiality that is outside of language and serves as a material drive for transition, but Prosser might have misunderstood the theory of construction. Gayle Salamon's Assuming a Body and Butler's Bodies that Matter both serve as a good rejoinder. Chapter seven is an excellent reading of Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, where Prosser reads trans-identity through a blurring of boundaries between genres and posits a very insightful discussion of self-narrative and subjectivity construction.
-
I bet you used this in your Gender and Sexuality Studies senior thesis, too...
