Second Skins – The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (Gender and Culture Series) - Hardcover

Prosser, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231109342 ISBN 13: 9780231109345

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. 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.

About this title

Review:

..."Prosser brilliantly proposes conceiving the transsexual as experiencing an Imaginary phantomization of the missing sexual organs, perhaps accompanied by an agnosic [sic] relation to the birth organs. Together, these conditions combine to motivate the transsexual to seek sex reassignment surgery as a healing of what is indeed a condition of gender dysphoria....Prosser's second substantial contribution, in "Second Skins," is a critique of poststructuralist analyses of gender and transgender....Prosser's theorization of the role of narrative in transsexual self-fashioning, and his explication of a range of exemplary transsexual autobiographies are acute and illuminating.... "Second Skins" does difficult, important work in helping us to think transsexuality critically rather than judgmentally." -- Jody Norton, Eastern Michigan University, "Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter"

Synopsis:

What is the relationship between the social and physical transitions of transsexuality and the narrative? And how can the link between somatic and symbolic ultimately deepen our understanding of transsexuality itself? This book examines the power of autobiographical narrative in interpreting transsexuality. Focusing on the union of body and narrative, the author conveys how transsexuality has been moulded by autobiographical acts. The book argues that the transsexual body - as a historical subject and the histories of individual transsexual subjects - is empowered by narrative. In the first part of the book, Prosser focuses on identity and bodily integrity, turning to the work of Judith Butler - who presents the homosexual theory view of the transgendered body - and Prosser's own theory of the transsexual body. The second part centres on narratives, including a critical recasting of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" into a transsexual novel and the study of transgender and trans-genre in Leslie Feinberg's "Stone Butch Blues", as well as lesser-known autobiographies. The book ends with photographs showing the transsexual body.

These images cut through the barriers between body and language and poststructuralist thinking focused on the materiality of the human body.

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0231109342
• ISBN 13: 9780231109345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 282