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"The Two Revolutions tells the long history of transgender communities online, reconstructing the various digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who laid the foundations for contemporary trans life"--
From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and characters, so too does Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire—none of whom identify as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for decolonizing queer studies.
It is estimated that three to five percent of the adult male population of the United States feels the need, at least occasionally, to dress in women's clothing. Judging from enrollment at her academy, Miss Vera would say that figure is low. Veronica Vera founded Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in 1992 and started a gender revolution. Working from the pink palace of the Academy's intimate Manhattan campus, she has helped hundreds of students embrace and master Venus Envy through her expert instruction in the arts of dressing up, making up, going out, and acting like a lady. In her new book, she shares her priceless wisdom with the world. With sparkling wit and dazzling insight, Miss V gives us the 411 on body hair, foundation garments, make-up, and dressing, as well as offering invaluable advice on Creating a Herstory (finding the real life story of the femmeself within) speech, manners, walking in high heels, and--that biggest step of all--going out in the real world all dressed up. Amply illustrated and filled with the real stories of students and graduates, Miss Vera's Finishing School also offers a fascinating history of how the Academy came to be, as well as Miss Vera's own incisive gender manifesto. "As we step boldly toward the new millennium, many more of us will be doing it in high heels," says Veronica Vera. In Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, she proves conclusively that, after a long day in wingtips, there's nothing like slipping into a pair of spiked heels.
The premise of Confessional Politics is that in this confessional age, "telling all is in." From a unique variety of perspectives and angles, the essays in this collection explore the association of confession with femininity; they examine its function as a gender-specific discourse as they probe its many feminized genres and subgenres. Confessional Politics investigates the creative and strategic ways in which women shape the telling of their sexual stories in order to resist and negotiate the confessional practices designed to position them in conventional sexual frameworks. Investigating the confessional politics of traditional forms of social life writing (including erotic diaries, journals, letters, and confessional fiction), this book significantly expands its focus beyond conventional forms to include practices affecting mass readerships and audiences. The collection addresses provocative general topics: talk shows, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexuality, self-help books, and cross-dressing, as well as expressive works such as contemporary Canadian women's poetry, lesbian fiction, performance art, Anne Frank's recently released complete diary, and memoirs.
Discover the influence of controversial writer Virginia Prince—friend, counselor, philosopher, and publicist for the cross-dressing community Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering documents the life and work of Virginia Prince, whose writings on transvestites and transsexuals influenced the thinking of an entire generation. This unique book gathers and updates her most important—and hard-to-find—articles that chronicle the development of her philosophy over a twenty-year period and provide insight into her role in the creation of a transgender community. The book includes a photo essay by acclaimed photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, a portrait of Virginia at age 92 from Richard F. Docter, and a foreword by celebrated transgender activist, historian, and scholar Susan Stryker. A staunch promoter of heterosexual transvestism since the late 1950s, Virginia Prince has had a powerful impact on the transgender community. She was the first person to establish a systematic organizational structure that provided a safe setting for transvestites and transsexuals to “come out,” and her advocacy of a “transgenderist” position since the late 1960s constituted a major conceptual and identity innovation. These articles focus on issues of sex, sexuality, and gender and serve as a foundation for what later became “transgender studies” in the 1990s. “The world that we live in is highly polarized and highly stereotyped into femininity and masculinity. What I would like to have you think about is the word in the middle-humanity. A man who wants to look after babies is only being a human being in dealing with young offspring. It has nothing to do with his being a male and not a female, and that is the problem in this area of sex and gender. This high degree of polarization in our society leads to all kinds of confusion in our culture. We must learn that being a person is more important than being either man or woman, male or female.” —Virginia Prince, “Sex vs. Gender” Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering is an invaluable resource for academics working in the field of transgender studies and an important historical document for members of the transgender community.
Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future. Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving &8239;historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.
This volume explores the diversity and complexity of transgender people’s experiences and demonstrates that gendered bodies are constructed through different social, cultural and economic networks and through different spaces and places. Rethinking Transgender Identities brings together original research in the form of interviews, participatory methods, surveys, cultural texts and insightful commentary. The contributing scholars and activists are located in Aotearoa New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, Catalan, China, Japan, Scotland, Spain, and the United States. The collection explores the relationship between transgender identities and politics, lived realities, strategies, mobilizations, age, ethnicity, activisms and communities across different spatial scales and times. Taken together, the chapters extend current research and provide an uthoritative state-of-the-art review of current research, which will appeal to cholars and graduate students working within the fields of sociology, gender studies, sexuality and queer studies, family studies, media and cultural studies, psychology, health, law, criminology, politics and human geography.
Candid, first-hand accounts of couples who stay together despite highly emotional gender issues. Head Over Heels gives voice to thirty ordinary women who live extraordinary lives as partners to crossdressers, transgenderists, and male-to-female transsexuals. These unique women discuss, with honesty and great candor, how they first learned of their partners’ gender issues, how they’ve coped with the emotions that followed, how they’ve dealt with concerns about privacy/secrecy, and how they’ve handled disclosure to children, friends, and family members. Far from a collection of “happily ever after” stories, these narratives are filled with pain, courage, curiosity, and joy as each woman struggles to redefine a relationship that includes intimacy, social acceptance, dignity, and respect. The women whose stories are featured in Head Over Heels didn't know their partners were gender-variant when they first met. Some found out early on; others learned of their husbands' gender variance after decades of marriage. Some were told by their husbands—men they considered “regular guys;” others found out on their own, sometimes in shocking ways. Their stories represent a wide spectrum of women's life experiences with crossdressers, transgenderists, transsexuals who are nonoperative, pre-operative, and post-operative, families without children, families with children at home, and families with children who have left home. But these women share one thing in common: each has decided to stay in her relationship, exploring her new life with an open, yet cautious, heart. Some of the voices heard in Head Over Heels: “While putting my clothes on, I found a sales receipt on the bureau from K-Mart for shoes, a bra, and stockings. My immediate thought was that my husband had a girlfriend.” “He dressed for me one night and it was the worst experience of both our lives. I was shocked and he knew it and that hurt him.” “My siblings had been aware of Trish’s transsexualism for several years when she went full-time. They have told me that while I will always be welcome in their homes, Trish is not.” “My husband may think differently, but I do have a sexual identity. Actually, I’m real clear about it—I am a woman and he is a man. I do not allow him to crossdress in the bedroom. I married a man; therefore, I will sleep with a man.” Head Over Heels also includes historical and current information about resources and support for wives of gender-variant people, and a substantive introduction that includes basic information about sexual and gender identity and related issues.
This book consists of essays presented as lectures to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The context was a special class during which students were reading the published work of Erving Goffman and writing about what they were reading. Some students enrolled as philosophy students and others as sociology students. Professor Hood and Professor Van De Vate often handed out printed versions to the students on the day they were presented. Dr. Hood took these printed versions to prepare the manuscript in a continuous form. The lectures themselves were presented some years apart, since the two departments agreed to offer the course only occasionally. The essays were designed to stimulate questions about what Goffman concludes, as well his techniques of observing and analyzing social life.
"Transgender" has become a convenient umbrella term to cover a collectivity of individuals (including cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals, and intersexuals) who do not conform to traditional norms of gender identity or behavior. Until recent centuries, transgender behavior has rarely been the subject of scholarly or public attention. During the 20th century, medical advances in hormone therapy and reconstructive surgery, the worldwide publicity generated by the Christine Jorgensen story in the 1950s, and the popularity of such plays and movies as La Cage Aux Folles and The Birdcage make the subject much more visible for society. This book is a compilation of autobiographies of women and men who openly describe their different and often very difficult journeys, frankly. Using a decade-by-decade format, the contributors provide the reader with critical insights into the process of realization that led to their various gender expressions. The contributors include homosexuals, heterosexuals, and bisexuals, and their life stories make clear that a good deal of diversity exists within the gender community. A thorough introduction by the editors provides many insights into gender issues from a biological, socio-anthropological, and historical perspective.