nonfiction review Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity

[jesse_the_k]

Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity by Arlene Stein (Author)

four of four stars

print, ebook

Appreciated this book, aimed at cis folks like me. Author is a Lesbian sociologist who shadows four people getting top surgery in a Florida clinic, then digs into academic research and interviews many people from the transmasculine end of the gender spectrum (a 3D space). For me, answered questions from second-wave anti-TERF lesbian standpoint. What does our animating experience of challenging the importance of gender mean, now, in this brave new world?

I am relieved and also, quite frankly, a bit bewildered by it all. My generation of feminists tried to tamp down gender as a way of minimizing its oppressiveness. We emphasized the similarities between men and women, embracing androgyny and unisex style, giving boys and girls the same toys, changing the language we used to refer to men and women as well as the messages we gave young people about what kinds of jobs are appropriate. My generation believed that gender is imposed on us by advertising, scientific experts, parents, teachers, and other influences. By taking control of how society defined gender, we believed that we could create a world where gender differences would play an insignificant, or at least minimal, role. We thought we could undo gender's hold on our lives.

Most of the younger people I interviewed for this book, in contrast, seem to have little interest in obliterating gender altogether. They acknowledge, quite rightly, that gender is institutionalized through norms, routines, and laws; and that it is shaped by those who have the power to define those norms, routines, and laws. Societies define gendered possibilities, affirming certain ways of living in the world and diminishing others, making some ways of being men and women more acceptable than others. They provide a template for imagining how we should or could live. Biological processes rooted in the body also help make us who we are. In addition, we also draw from a rich storehouse of unconscious fantasies, memories, and feelings, some of which we learn in our families, as well as from widely recognized cultural values. "Each person personally inflects and creates her 'own' gender,' as the feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow has written. Individuals are not simply reflections of the culture. We push up against it, adopting some of its values, resisting others. The people I write about in this book find the courage to defy the rules, challenging authority figures and undergoing painful, expensive body modifications, often at great risk to themselves: they feel that they need to be true to themselves, and they know that society isn't necessarily going to accommodate them.

My generation of feminists thought we could undo the constraints of gender by casting off high heels and constraining bras, and refusing to abide by "gender roles" in the family and without. We tried to conjure a world, through talk, through community building, and by passing civil rights protections, in which women and men would become more fundamentally similar to each other. We made it sexy and fun to be lesbians, whom we often saw as the vanguard of resistance to "the patriarchy" Today's generation continues some of those projects. It, too, is acutely aware of the limitations of the ways we organize gender, and the ways the powerful have the capacity to define what is and isn't normal. But the younger people I met in researching this book are much more willing to let a thousand genders bloom, and to see the modification of bodies, and language, as the foundation for such projects. For them the struggle for greater freedom of gender expression is the focus. Language is changing at a breakneck pace, describing new, previously unknown forms of identification. Lee Naught, who identifies as mixed-race, Chican@, and genderqueer, writes: "I live in a space of gray, which is what queerness is all about to me: defining oneself rather than being trapped within unchangeable categories." A younger generation of gender activists, who have come of age in a consumerist society of seemingly endless choices, is developing new words to describe how bodies, selves, and feelings collide.

Comments

[sqbr]

This was interesting, thank you!