Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality

by Jay Prosser

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231533805
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/07/1998
Series:	Gender and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Jay Prosser is a lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Transitions -- Changing Bodies, Changing Narratives
Part 1: Bodies
1. Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex
2. A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment
Part 2: Narratives
3. Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography
4. "Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition": The Invert, The Well of Loneliness, and the Narrative Origins of Transexuality
5. No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues
Epilogue: Transsexuality in Photography -- Fielding the Referent
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Diane Wood Middlebrook

"In his elegant, absorbing, and groundbreaking study of the transgendered subject, Jay Prosser draws on an array of autobiographical accounts by transsexuals to re-think, for our time, descriptive categories that enmesh sexuality with gender. Prosser's empathic and incisive argument will leave gender studies shaken up and permanently reconfigured."

— Diane Wood Middlebrook, Stanford University; author of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton

Rita Felski

"It is unusual to encounter a book that is as innovative, lucid and thought-provoking as Second Skins. Prosser's book will undoubtedly become an essential work in transsexual studies, and should also be read by anyone even remotely interested in contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, and the body."

— Rita Felski, University of Virginia

Editorial Reviews

It is unusual to encounter a book that is as innovative, lucid and thought-provoking as Second Skins. Prosser's book will undoubtedly become an essential work in transsexual studies, and should also be read by anyone even remotely interested in contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, and the body.

Rita Felski

...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, inSecond 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

In his elegant, absorbing, and groundbreaking study of the transgendered subject, Jay Prosser draws on an array of autobiographical accounts by transsexuals to re-think, for our time, descriptive categories that enmesh sexuality with gender. Prosser's empathic and incisive argument will leave gender studies shaken up and permanently reconfigured.

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Examines narratives of the process of changing sex to find the various dimensions of transition experienced by transsexuals. Finds that such transitions can be the route to identity and bodily integrity. Among the topics are autobiography, Radclyffe Hall's , and Leslie Feinberg's . Developed from a doctoral dissertation for the City University of New York. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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