Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality

Description

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. Contents ......Page 8 Acknowledgments ......Page 10 Personal......Page 14 Material......Page 17 Categorical......Page 25 PART 1: BODIES......Page 32 Transgender and the Queer Moment......Page 34 Queer Gender and Performativity......Page 40 Heterosexual Melancholia and the Encrypting of Sex......Page 47 Venus is Burning: The Transubstantiation of the Transsexual......Page 58 Queer Feminism and Critical Impropriety: Transgender as Transitional Object?......Page 68 Surface Material......Page 74 Second Skins: Transsexual Body Image......Page 80 From Mutilation to Integration: The Poetics of Sex Reassignment Surgery......Page 93 Body Politics and Personal Prosthetics......Page 103 PART 2: NARATIVES......Page 110 Transsexual Mirror Stages......Page 112 Autobiography as Symptom: Telling Stories......Page 116 Transsexual Conformity: The Published Return......Page 127 Reading Back: Toward a Transsexual Canon......Page 144 The Trials of a Lesbian Novel......Page 148 Reading Inversion: The Sexological Case History......Page 153 The Transsexual in Between......Page 165 Dreaming Flesh: The Transsexual in 1be Well......Page 168 Transitional Ages......Page 179 The Transgender Moment......Page 184 A Dislocated Subject and the Dream of a Transgendered Community......Page 190 Generic Displacements: Fictional Autobiography......Page 203 Transgender and Transsexual Locations: The Politics of Home......Page 213 Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography—Fielding the Referent ......Page 220 Introduction: On Transitions—Changing Bodies, Changing Narratives ......Page 250 1. Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex......Page 251 2. A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment......Page 255 3. Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography......Page 258 4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition": The Invert, The Well of Loneliness, and the Narrative Origins of Transsexuality......Page 261 5. No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues......Page 266 Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography—Fielding the Referent ......Page 271 Index ......Page 274