This abstract is from information provided by the publisher.
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 the flesh and head—to cross the boundary of sex. This is an explosive and unique study of the intersections of transsexuality, narrative, and theory that will have a profound effect on the study of both gender and sexuality.
In this extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute 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—thus transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading this plot through transsexual's own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality but creates an identity story that crosses the body/language divide currently stalling poststructuralist thought.
In the first part, Prosser focuses on identity and bodily integrity, turning to the work of Judith Butler. The second part centers 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 transsexual autobiographies.
The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 29 photographic portraits of transsexual—-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 theoretic al discussion and close textual work, 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.
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