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Engaging with a broad range of audiences, Salamon makes a convincing case that the lens offered by transgendered embodiment and subjectivity reconfigures entrenched theoretical positions in gender studies, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. -- Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University Assuming a Body makes a stunning intervention, by way of phenomenology, into contemporary theories of the body. Situating transgenderism within 'rhetorics of materiality,' Gayle Salamon crafts a supple theoretical framework capable of accounting for both the theory and the lived experience of alternative genders. This book will undoubtedly bridge the gap between transgender studies and critical theory, and, in the process, will open up new ways of understanding what it means to be embodied. -- J. Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives The 'next big thing' for anyone interested in critically theorizing about contemporary transgender phenomena, Assuming a Body squarely addresses the debates and polemics thrown up during the field's fiery formative decade in the 1990s-the relationships between trans, queer, and feminist theories; performativity, discursivity, and materiality; and psychoanalysis and its discontents-and powerfully hits these balls back across the net. Salamon's next-generation (re)iteration of these intellectually vital arguments forges stronger connections between trans studies and current reappraisals of affective or phenomenological approaches to embodiment, as well as to the post-9/11 turn toward political economy and the critique of neoliberal governmentality. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines will be citing, siding with, and taking aim at this important book for years to come. -- Susan Stryker, Indiana University For those who enjoy a challenge, this book rewards with its timely, thought-provoking examination of the body, and the intersection of transgender psychology and critical theory. -- Rachel Pepper Curve 5/1/11
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We believe we know our bodies intimately - that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for thinking about embodiment. Salamon suggests that the difference between transgendered and normatively gendered bodies is not, in the end, material. Rather, she argues that the production of gender itself relies on a disjunction between the "felt sense" of the body and an understanding of the body's corporeal contours, and that this process need not be viewed as pathological in nature. Examining the relationship between material and phantasmatic accounts of bodily being, Salamon emphasizes the productive tensions that make the body both present and absent in our consciousness and work to confirm and unsettle gendered certainties. She questions traditional theories that explain how the body comes to be - and comes to be made one's own - and she offers a new framework for thinking about what "counts" as a body. The result is a groundbreaking investigation into the phenomenological life of gender.
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2 reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Interdisciplinary trans-theory for academics that don't get it.
10 April 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
As a transwoman, books about transgender theory typically make my skin crawl with the anticipation of the author's short-sighted and prejudicial stance. We get beat up alot by our critics and they come in all ilks, academics included. Gayle Salamon takes a somewhat meandering perspective using the phenomenolgy of Merleau-Ponty (not Hegel) and some psychoanalytic theory from Freud to critically deconstruct the sometimes polemical views of others on the subject of trans-embodiment and meaning. I found the book to be a bit uneven - it sometimes resorts to the linguistic density of Judith Butler and at other times (especially from chapter four on) is perfectly understandable and coherent. Salamon appears to use critical theory and the dialectic to extract appearance from essence ala Horkheimer and Adorno, surgically removing the masks of bias from the face of existing separatist and essentialist theories. The book does introduce some interesting concepts and arguements which hopefully will stimulate new thinking about what trans-people mean, especially to feminists who refuse to take responsibility for our existence. I do think that the author places an over-emphasis on sexuality and sometimes drifts into metaphysical territory that exists on the plane of a dream-scape. Education and ideas in support of the gender-possible are always appreciated, although the paradox lies in watching a debate unfold over our right to exist, something that we already take for granted. I do recommend this book with the single caveat that it isn't specifically about trans-folks but a serious theoretical and philosophical persepctive regarding the subject(s). For a primer on being transgendered look to Kate Bornstein.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
incredibly lucid and radical
20 April 2010
Format:Paperback
I disagree with some of the criticisms in the prior review since this is one of the most clear-headed, lucid, and radical books I've read on this subject in the last years. For those of us who have worked in the trans community for years, this book actually gives us so much of what we have been needing. It shows that what we are about has everything to do with theory, and that we need theory and philosophy for our lives. There are so few books that really rock you in this way, and Gayle Salamon's extremely smart readings of Freud and phenomenology and the body image open me to new worlds and make me see that intellectual work is really nourishment for the soul - which is the body after all. Here is a really perspicacious and radical author who thinks carefully about what it means to be a body in this world and how we become one. How rare is that!
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