Promotional Information

"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 "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

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

About the Author

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

Reviews

..."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"