Second Skins

Gender and Culture Series

by Jay Prosser

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.

Genres: Queer, Transgender, Nonfiction, Philosophy, LGBT, Gender, Theory

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bet you used this in your Gender and Sexuality Studies senior thesis, too...

[Chris Ma · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este talvez tenha sido o livro mais completo e complexo que já li sobre transexualidade. Peguei ele na biblioteca da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina e, ao acabar o livro, senti que precisava fazer um xerox da maioria dos capítulos do livro, porque ele traz ângulos e prismas sobre a transexualidade que se relacionam com a minha pesquisa, principalmente nas questões da identidade e da escrita de si. E sim, eu sou do tempo em que se tirava xerox dos livros e que pegava eles emprestados nas bibliotecas. Sou old school mas também sei usar os recursos da web a meu favor. Só que dessa vez não encontrei uma versão digital deste livro, que é do início dos anos 2000. Realmente foi uma boa ideia ir atrás de livros sobre transexualidade para entender o gênero a partir de uma matriz de ficção, que é a tese que venho trabalhado. Sei que este livro irá contribuir bastante para a pesquisa.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Travis Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this text gets a lot of shit for misinterpreting Butler/being a bit behind on things which is fair, but I'm just so fascinated by the idea of how narrative can be constrained by the language and the conventions which it undergoes. Whether it's something like a general story structure emphasizing certain elements (things like rising action, climax), or a medicalized narrative/pathologization imposed onto trans people to create a false "story" of what transgender means (must it be a man in a woman's clothes? Must a dress for example be feminine?), either way, it makes me question every story entirely, even something as seemingly legitimate as the autobiography. It begs the question almost, what came first: the person or the story. What defines what and how do we understand who a person is and what their story is?

Now as to whether or not a proper object is necessary in gender studies or the idea of transness, I'm not sure. I would lean towards moving away from a proper object because that implies definition and therefore limitation. I believe trans represents a move away from limitation and convention, something more capacious than ideas of sex or identity.

Either way Prosser is an outstanding writer and although it took me way too long to get through this (and I barely understood most of it since I'm still such a novice in gender studies), I'm super glad I read it (even though some points are contentious and a bit dated [especially in regards to his understanding of sex in contrast to Bodies that Matter]). I'll read some Judith Butler for real now but their shit is pretty difficult to get through.

Well, how can I even attempt to talk about gender if I haven't read Butler. That's how I feel about things at least. Prosser is a good start among many, many more.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Keaton]

read intro through ch 2

[nunu sociale · Rating 2 out of 5]

autant il y avait des passages intéressants, autant une grosse partie du livre est datée...

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe not ALL books by trans men are bad