This article draws on in-depth interviews with nine white, middle-class, male-to-female transsexuals to examine how they produce and experience bodily transformation. Interviewees’ bodywork entailed retraining, redecorating, and reshaping the physical body, which shaped their feelings, role-taking, and self-monitoring. These analyses make three contributions: They offer support for a perspective that embodies gender, further transsexual scholarship, and contribute to feminist debate over the sex/gender distinction. The authors conclude by exploring how viewing gender as embodied could influence medical discourse on transsexualism and have personal and political consequences for transsexuals.
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th ed.Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
2.
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge.
3.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1961. The second sex. New York: Bantam.
4.
Billings, Dwight, and Thomas Urban. 1982. The socio-medical construction of transsexualism: An interpretation and critique. Social Problems29:266-282.
5.
Bolin, Anne. 1988. In search of Eve: Transsexualrites of passage. South Hadley, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
6.
Burke, Phyllis. 1996. Gender shock: Exploding the myths of male and female. New York: Doubleday.
7.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
8.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.”New York: Routledge.
9.
Davis, Kathy. 1995. Reshaping the female body: The dilemma of cosmetic surgery. New York: Routledge.
10.
Dellinger, Kirsten, and Christine L. Williams. 1997. Makeup at work: Negotiating appearance rules in the workplace. Gender & Society11:151-177.
11.
Ekins, Richard. 1997. Male femaling: A grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London: Routledge.
12.
Erickson, Rebecca J.1995. The importance of authenticity for self and society. Symbolic Interaction8:121-144.
13.
Gagné, Patricia, and Deanna McGaughey. 2002. Designing women: Cultural hegemony and the exercise of power among women who have undergone elective mammoplasty. Gender& Society16:814-838.
14.
Gagné, Patricia, and Richard Tewksbury. 1998. Conformity pressures and gender resistance among transgendered individuals. Social Problems45:81-101.
15.
Gagné, Patricia, and Richard Tewksbury. 1999. Knowledge and power, body and self: An analysis of knowledge systems and the transgendered self. Sociological Quarterly40:59-83.
16.
Gagné, Patricia, Richard Tewksbury, and Deanna McGaughey. 1997. Coming out and crossing over: Identity formation and proclamation in a transgender community. Gender & Society11:478-508.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California.
19.
Hausman, Bernice L.1995. Changing sex: Transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
20.
Hausman, Ken. 2003. Controversy continues to grow over DSM’s GID diagnosis. Psychiatric News38:25.
21.
Heller Feinbloom, Deborah. 1976. Transvestites and transsexuals. New York: Delta.
22.
Kando, Thomas. 1973. Sex change: The achievement of gender identity among feminized transsexuals. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.
23.
Kennelly, Ivy, Sabine N. Merz, and Judith Lorber. 2001. What is gender?American Sociological Review66:598-605.
24.
Kessler, Suzanne, and Wendy McKenna. 1978. Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. Chicago: University of Chicago.
25.
Lofland, John, and Lyn H. Lofland. 1984. Analyzing social settings: A guide to qualitative observation and analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
26.
Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
27.
Lorber, Judith, and Patricia Yancey Martin. 1998. The socially constructed body: Insights from feminist theory. In Illuminating social life, edited by Peter Kivisto, 183-206. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
28.
Martin, Patricia Yancey. 2004. Gender as social institution. Social Forces82:1249-1274.
29.
Mason-Schrock, Douglas P.1996. Transsexuals’ narrative construction of the “true self.”Social Psychology Quarterly59:176-192.
30.
McCaughey, Martha. 1998. The fighting spirit: Women’s self-defense training and the discourse of sexed embodiment. Gender & Society12:277-300.
31.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago.
32.
Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a woman?New York: Oxford University Press.
33.
Namaste, Viviane K.2000. Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and transgendered people. Chicago: University of Chicago.
34.
Raymond, Janice. 1979. The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. Boston: Beacon.
35.
Risman, Barbara J.1982. The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals. Qualitative Sociology4:312-325.
36.
Risman, Barbara J.1998. Gender vertigo: American families in transition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
37.
Risman, Barbara J.2001. Calling the bluff of value-free science. American Sociological Review66:605-611.
38.
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In Toward an anthropology of women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review.
39.
Rubin, Henry. 2003. Self-made men: Identity and embodiment among transsexual men. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
40.
Schrock, Douglas, Daphne Holden, and Lori Reid. 2004. Creating emotional resonance: Interpersonal emotion work and motivational framing in a transgender community. Social Problems51:61-81.
41.
Schwalbe, Michael, Sandra Godwin, Daphne Holden, Douglas Schrock, Shealy Thompson, and Michelle Wolkomir. 2000. Generic processes in the reproduction of inequality: An interactionist analysis. Social Forces79:419-452.
42.
Schwalbe, Michael L.1992. Male supremacy and the narrowing of the moral self. Berkeley Journal of Sociology31:29-54.
43.
Stoller, Robert J.1968. Sex and gender: On the development of masculinity and femininity. New York: Science House.
44.
Turner, Ralph H.1976. The real self: From institution to impulse. American Journal of Sociology81:989-1016.
45.
West, Candice, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender & Society9:8-37.
46.
West, Candice, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society1:125-151.
