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quietbookworm's review
2.0
The information imparted in this book was interesting, but the manner in which it was presented less so. It read like a dissertation, and I felt the book could have been written in a less textbook way.
ralowe's review
5.0
i'm told that critical trans studies is a burgeoning genre. immediately there was something really engaging about this book, i hadn't really seen anything like it. it presents an approach to the constitution of the body that is made possible through the situated knowledges of transgender subjectivities. the emphasis here on the "felt sense" of a body has close affinity to the cluster of contingent factors that comprise blackness in the social. i was curious if it is possible to suggest that the body and sense of self is something entirely constituted in language, but i'm still unsure if that really tells the whole story. salamon takes some time in one chapter to defend their advisor judith butler against her critiques, and one of the most useful notions offered to suggest a reconciliation of gender as social construction vs. felt sense is that they relate recursively as necessary preconditions for each other. kind of a chicken/egg thing. i think these are all useful ideas, and what may strik some as offputting is the focus on the phenomenology of transgender. i was relieved that it wasn't ethnographic-feeling. i think some people might find a contradiction in the feminist framing yet little scrutiny of regimes of power that disproportionately affect trans people such as capture or the prison. in the last chapter, salamon does consider an adjacent topic when comparing how transgender sociality is preoccupied with getting phenomenology and bureaucracy to match up. mostly transgender is talked about as if transparent i.e. white, and i considered ducking my review a star because of it. i would if there wasn't a book like dean spade's that devotes a nearly inordinate portion of time talking about race. what's weird here is when salamon spends forever talking about the boys of the lexington calendar but doesn't situate the lexington within mission gentrification.
juliaem's review
2.0
Just finished this for my queer psychology consultation group. It took us forever to get through, which was partially 2020, and partially this text. I'm not one of those people who have a low tolerance for post-modern academic writing: I read & loved Judith Butler in college. Butler was actually Salamon's dissertation adviser, and I don't want to be overly critical, but Salamon's writing is Butler-esque without the benefit of being, ya know, Butler. There are just so many textual flourishes that feel obfuscating instead of clarifying. I do think that Salamon's phenomenlogical point is a very important one: people like trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) fall into a error of wanting two incompatible things to be true at once, that gender is both a completely social construct and a fixed biological Truth (TERFs hold this untenable position by wanting cisgender women to break free of the wholly constructed category of "women" in a patriarchy, while denying that same freedom to transwomen because of their essentially and irrevocably "male" bodies - obviously this is a very harmful viewpoint for trans people, often in a concrete way, as well as intellectually sloppy). I appreciate her use of psychoanalytic texts to posit that all of us experience dysphoria about our bodies to some degree (like does anyone know anyone who is always 100% unsurprised and pleased by what they see in the mirror and/or photos/videos/audio of themselves), meaning that the trans experience, while of course unique in very important ways, is also part of a spectrum of human embodied experience. I just wish her arguments had been more clearly stated, and although this was never intended to be clinical reading, more closely linked to the lived experiences of trans people in a transphobic world, and more frequently and effectively using their voices to illuminate those experiences.
haimson's review
5.0
I just read two chapters: "Boys of the Lex: Transgender and Social Construction" and "Transfeminism and the Future of Gender" because they were suggested reading for Judith Halberstam's upcoming visit to Pittsburgh. Both chapters were pretty stellar!
garberdog's review
3.0
A clear, concise, and compelling work of theory. This text makes a critical intervention into gender theory, pushing back against some of the worst excesses of essentialism, liberal individualism, and insipidity that often plagues trans theory (I'm looking at you, Jay Prosser) while simultaneously critiquing the cissexism of many feminist theories of embodiment (notably Grosz and Hausman). Theories from psychoanalysis and phenomenology, as well as from thinkers like Irigaray, are presented, explained and expanded upon on useful and interesting ways.
So it's a real shame that Salamon makes the bizarre, transmisogynistic, and ill-informed choice to center trans-masculinity in this text. She states at the end of her introduction "my general discussions of trans (sic) will often take MTF experience as my focus, in a reversal of what has historically been a conflation of trans experience with MTF experience." Beyond the fact that this is simply incorrect, it's politically repugnant. Even if trans-feminine people (and specifically here, trans women) did take up "disproportionate" space in transgender discourse, they have every right to. Trans women experience far more violence, higher rates of incarceration, and much greater stimga and discrimination (transmisogyny is word for a reason) than do trans men. This infuriateing decision returns to haunt the text in chapter 3 and most unforgivbly in chapter 4, where Salamon gets basic facts about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival wrong (she states that both trans men and trans women are excluded; in fact, only trans women are excluded, trans men being allowed in because they were "born women"). She focuses so much time and attention on trans men that trans women are only rarely if even mentioned, and then only in passing. This, despite the fact that the vast majority of what Salamon seems to be critiquing is better described as transmisogyny, and not cissexism or transphobia (ie trans women specifically are impacted). This makes this work another in a long history of cisgender feminists valorizing masculinity at the expense of trans women. This is a real shame, because Salamon's text shines it's strongest when she is discussing either trans women specifically or trans people in the abstract. Her politics themselves are lackluster.
Which brings up the next critical weakness of this text: Salamon completely ignores race and class. She may not have been trying to write Dean Spade's "Normal Life," but she doesn't talk about how it is trans women of color (and particularly black trans women) who face the harshest consequences of white supremacist (trans)misogyny. She never speaks of prisons, colonialism, police brutality, capitalism, or any other horrible violent systems that impact trans folks every day. Again, I recognize she's writing theory; but that's not an excuse, and her work suffers for it.
This brings me to a general complaint: it seems impossible to find transfeminist theory that is social constructionist, anti-essentialist, intersectional, actually feminist (as opposed to transmisogynist and femmephobic), and historically and politically aware. One gets at best one or two of these things (like Julia Serano's books, which are (liberal) transfeminist, but are also deeply essentialist, reductionist, and more importantly racist and classist as all get out.)
So it's a real shame that Salamon makes the bizarre, transmisogynistic, and ill-informed choice to center trans-masculinity in this text. She states at the end of her introduction "my general discussions of trans (sic) will often take MTF experience as my focus, in a reversal of what has historically been a conflation of trans experience with MTF experience." Beyond the fact that this is simply incorrect, it's politically repugnant. Even if trans-feminine people (and specifically here, trans women) did take up "disproportionate" space in transgender discourse, they have every right to. Trans women experience far more violence, higher rates of incarceration, and much greater stimga and discrimination (transmisogyny is word for a reason) than do trans men. This infuriateing decision returns to haunt the text in chapter 3 and most unforgivbly in chapter 4, where Salamon gets basic facts about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival wrong (she states that both trans men and trans women are excluded; in fact, only trans women are excluded, trans men being allowed in because they were "born women"). She focuses so much time and attention on trans men that trans women are only rarely if even mentioned, and then only in passing. This, despite the fact that the vast majority of what Salamon seems to be critiquing is better described as transmisogyny, and not cissexism or transphobia (ie trans women specifically are impacted). This makes this work another in a long history of cisgender feminists valorizing masculinity at the expense of trans women. This is a real shame, because Salamon's text shines it's strongest when she is discussing either trans women specifically or trans people in the abstract. Her politics themselves are lackluster.
Which brings up the next critical weakness of this text: Salamon completely ignores race and class. She may not have been trying to write Dean Spade's "Normal Life," but she doesn't talk about how it is trans women of color (and particularly black trans women) who face the harshest consequences of white supremacist (trans)misogyny. She never speaks of prisons, colonialism, police brutality, capitalism, or any other horrible violent systems that impact trans folks every day. Again, I recognize she's writing theory; but that's not an excuse, and her work suffers for it.
This brings me to a general complaint: it seems impossible to find transfeminist theory that is social constructionist, anti-essentialist, intersectional, actually feminist (as opposed to transmisogynist and femmephobic), and historically and politically aware. One gets at best one or two of these things (like Julia Serano's books, which are (liberal) transfeminist, but are also deeply essentialist, reductionist, and more importantly racist and classist as all get out.)
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