Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality.

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. By Jay Prosser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 280 pages. Cloth, $47.50; Paper, $17.00.

Reviewed by Holly Devor, Ph.D., University of Victoria, Sociology Department, Box 3050, Victoria, B.C., Canada, V8W 3P5.

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality by Jay Prosser is a valuable corrective to what, for this writer, has been a serious problem in postmodernist feminist and queer theorizing about gender. Prosser sets about to expose a failure to account for the concreteness of physical embodiment in much recent work about transsexed people.(1) Simply stated, Prosser's task in this book is to remind feminist and queer theorists that words and cultural representations may have tremendous power in our lives, but people live in real bodies made of substantial flesh, and those bodies routinely carry more weight in people's perceptions of themselves and others than do words, texts, or abstract discourses.

As surprising as it may seem to those unfamiliar with this field of theory, this is a radical message in the context in which it is framed and delivered, and therein lies the crux of the book's greatest strengths and weaknesses. It makes a point that I consider to be extremely well taken and more than overdue. However, because the issues with which Prosser concerns himself are ones which are largely promulgated by postmodernist theorists, his audience and his language are similarly focussed. For example, consider the following selection of unwieldy prose:

   Although Dillon might employ homosexuality in his terminology therefore,
   his delineation of transsexuality through coherent transgender plots and,
   crucially, the symptomization of transsexuality in the subject's
   narrativization of this plot, paradigmatically returns to the symptomology
   of sexual inversion and prefigures that of the transsexual diagnosis. (p.
   154)

This book is not an easy read. Prosser's valuable message could have a wider audience had he made it his business to move beyond the confines of a particular writing style which impresses many people with its apparent density but alienates many more readers with its finely-nuanced jargon and use of arcane postmodernist language. Although, in Prosser's defense, I can imagine that those people who most need to hear his message are exactly the ones who most revel in precisely this kind of discourse; and it's entirely possible that few of the people whom I expect would be put off by Prosser's style of writing have ever made it very far into the theoretical corners which need Prosser's illuminating arguments. Thus, my own complaint may well be moot, and Prosser's aim excellent.

Prosser opens with an introduction in which he establishes his own embodied credentials. Prosser himself has made a transition from female to male. As he says, "Without a doubt, my turning as critic to write on transsexual narratives represents a displaced biographical act.... articulating the transitions in these texts ... has also been quite profoundly a way of working on mine" (p. 4). He goes on to explain that his theoretical goal in this book is to use autobiographical accounts written by transsexed people to show that their experiences of themselves in their bodies are what drives their understanding of themselves as transsexed, and that they do this despite intense social and cultural pressures for them to see themselves as members of their natal sex. In taking this approach, Prosser runs counter to postmodernist theoretical trends which tend to claim that people's conceptualizations of the meanings attached to the shapes of their bodies are wholly products of the beliefs and values of the cultures in which they are embedded. More specifically, Prosser sets out to demonstrate that transsexed people become transsexed to themselves from within their bodily experience, whereas they become transsexed to others through the mechanisms of being able to tell a life story which can be believed as a justification for being transsexed. Prosser's claims run counter to much postmodernist theory about gender. He contends that gender is ultimately far more real (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and far less pliable than contemporary feminist and queer theorists would have us believe.

Part 1, "Bodies," contains two chapters. The first is a lengthy precis and critique of the gender theories of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), and the second is a more wide-ranging literature review subtitled "Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment." It was in the first of these chapters that the book most betrayed its origins as a reworking of an erudite, witty, and well-crafted dissertation for a Ph.D. in English. Prosser goes to great lengths to set up Butler as a straw theorist who must be thoroughly deconstructed before he can present his own ideas. Essentially (if I may use such a word in this context), Prosser positions Butler as the person who has single-handedly and all but inextricably built queer theory on the idea that all lesbians and gays are ultimately transgendered in that they violate gender norms of heterosexuality and its associated gender presentations, and that all transgendered people are definitionally queer in that they unsettle and disrupt notions of gender as binary and permanent. Prosser's counter-argument is that many transsexed people are anything but queer, in any sense of the word. They are not, and do not aspire to be, in any way transgressive. What they want is to be authentically themselves, and recognizably so to others. This requires that they straighten (not queer) the relationship between their sex and their gender.

In the second chapter in Part 1, Prosser takes the reader through a series of theoretical ideas which build into his "Theory of Transsexual Embodiment." The chapter opens with an account of a surgical performance artist who treats the surfaces of her skin as clay to remold into interesting images, and whom Prosser characterizes as "an insane personification of the poststructuralist insistence on the absolute constructedness of the body" (p. 62). Prosser introduces as more rational Anzieu's (1989) idea of the skin ego, that is, the idea that individuation is fundamentally derived from the experiences of ourselves as separate from others and that one's skin is the most fundamental marker of one's personal boundaries. Prosser explains that, for transsexed people, this skin ego is problematic. In order to have a coherent sense of self, one needs to live in one's skin. When that skin outlines the wrong contours it leads to what Oliver Sacks (1990) called body agnosia, wherein one is so alienated from parts of one's body that they become insensate and/or unacknowledged as one's own. Concurrently, many transsexed people experience phantom flesh. At the same time as certain bodily contours are unincorporable into their self-images, others which are not yet corporeal are felt to be present. Prosser argues that, within this framework, sex reassignment surgeries, with their cutting and reshaping of body parts, actually serve the purpose of psychically bringing back to life or reattaching previously phantom or lost-to-the-self flesh.

In Part 2, "Narratives," Prosser takes the reader through three chapters in which he develops the idea that autobiographical writings of transsexed people demonstrate a process of self-justification for their sex reassignment. Prosser argues that such narratives work to validate the necessity of bringing self and body into alignment, and of bringing body image and the image of the body into congruence.

In Chapter 3, "Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography," Prosser remarks on the recurring theme of mirrors in autobiographical accounts by transsexed people. Mirrors play a central role because they reflect the dissonance or consonance of psychic and physical body images. Further, he discusses how in all autobiography there is a disjuncture between the teller of the story and the subject of the story told, until such time as the story joins the teller in the present time. It is in this sense, Prosser explains, that transsexed people must bring themselves into existence through telling their stories in such a way that they may be read as always having been (at least internally) as they are, or will be, post-transition. Thus, he offers autobiography as the pivotal diagnostic symptom of the transsexed condition. It is only through the convincing telling of one's story that one may come to be diagnosed as transsexed. However, most transsexed people would prefer not to be read as transsexed once their story has been sufficiently told to obtain the desired result; that is, once they have achieved a publicly readable version of a heretofore private story of selfhood and body.

In Chapter 4, following several years of similar informal discussions among FTM (female-to-male) transsexed people, Prosser reclaims Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928, 1982) as a story of a transsexed person which was told before the word transsexual, or the associated medical technologies, were available. Prosser points out that the story of the protagonist, Stephen Gordon, was presented as that of an invert, not as that of a lesbian. However, the use of the term invert has come to be portrayed in the intervening years as no more than an historical artifact--the term invert was often used synonymously with homosexual at the time that Radclyffe Hall wrote her autobiographical novel. Thus, until the 1970s and lesbian feminism's redefinition of lesbians as women-loving-women, the usual understanding was that lesbians were women who wanted to be men, that is, those who were originally called inverts. Prosser backs up his contention that the inverts of Hall's day were actually transsexed, not homosexual, with examples of early sexological descriptions of inverts which resonate with contemporary descriptions of transsexed people, and with examples from The Well of Loneliness which are consistent with the characteristics of autobiographies by transsexed people.

Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1993) forms the subject of Chapter 5. In this chapter, Prosser uses Feinberg's thinly-veiled autobiographical novel to take up the distinction between transgendered and transsexed identities. Jess, the protagonist of the book, starts out as a stone butch lesbian. That is, she often passes for a man and has sufficient sex dysphoria that she rarely allows herself to be seen naked or touched in a sexual way. With the intrusion of 1970s feminism into her life, Jess feels herself unwelcomed among lesbians and, with the aid of testosterone injections and a double mastectomy, begins to live as a man. It is Jess's response to hir image in the mirror which, for Prosser, marks hir as transgendered.(2) Jess is no happier passing as an unremarkable man than s/he was as a butch woman. Neither suits hir. Jess's rightful place as a transgendered person is in a social and corporeal space of neither/both. For Prosser, it is this location of self-identity outside of binary sex and gender categories that separates transgendered from transsexed people. Transsexed people long for and pursue a congruence which feels false to transgendered individuals.

Biographical and autobiographical photographic imagery is the subject of the final chapter, "Epilogue." Referring to a collection of photographs of transsexed people, Prosser points out that photographic representations are meant to embody their subjects through their inherent claims to realness. This creates a problem for those who might attempt to portray transsexed subjects. Before and after photographs display only sex or gender as it is typically known, thus leaving only some images produced during sex and gender transitions as representing the subject as transsexed. Prosser points to this as the ultimate conundrum of all attempts at representations by transsexed people. To claim to be transsexed is to assert that one has always rightfully been one's ultimately sexed and gendered self. To most effectively live as such in the present requires the appearance of having always lived as such in the past. But to represent oneself as transsexed is to undermine one's claims to authenticity and constancy of sex and gender. If one wishes to be seen as authentically embodied, then one's transsexedness must be shed like a no-longer-needed second skin.

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality is an interesting and thoughtful book, but it is not for everybody. Prosser covers much new ground neatly and carefully. He takes on theoretical concepts that have become almost sacrosanct in certain circles, and deftly brings them to ground. Unfortunately for most readers, he does so in the same kind of hard-to-access language in which those ideas were originally written. Thus, although I think highly of Prosser's analysis, I recommend this book enthusiastically only to those readers who are interested in queer theory, transgender theory, transsexual theory, or feminist gender performitivity theory, and who are familiar with the specialized language conventions commonly used in those fields.

(1) I prefer to use the term transsexed rather than transsexual. I do this to emphasize that the transition in question is from one sex status to another. The word transsexual evokes thoughts of sexuality in the minds of most people, and is therefore misleading. Prosser himself uses the term in a similar sense to my own (e.g., p. 63).

(2) I use hir as a gender-neutral pronoun in recognition of Jess's transgenderism.

REFERENCES

Anzieu, D. (1989). The skin ego: A psychoanalytic approach to self (C. Turner, Trans.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge.

Feinberg, L. (1993). Stone butch blues: A novel. New York: Firebrand.

Hall, R. (1982). The well of loneliness. London: Virago. (Original work published 1928).

Sacks, O. (1990). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. New York: Harper.

Michael R. Stevenson, Ph.D. Department of Psychological Sciences Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306, USA