yoominbean's review
2.0
I really wanted to like this book. I knew, going in, that it had the potential to be pretty rough, what with being written in 1979 and the tendency of second wave critiques to be super transphobic and super white-centric. And that was really what got me. The first few essays were pretty awesome for what they were, and I could mostly put aside what was obviously wrong with them and appreciate the fact that people thirty years ago were doing work very similar to what I did for my thesis. Feminist critiques of gender and sex related science is my favorite thing ever, and the authors were articulating things that more recent writers have completely failed to see.
But the negatives got to be too much, in the end. After an incredibly offensive footnote about how terrible trans* people are and essay after essay where it would have been so easy to bring race into the mix but instead white people were just assumed to be the default and the white experience was apparently everyone's experience in 1979, I had to put the book aside and let myself be incredibly frustrated. Because some good analysis isn't really worth it if you're going to run over everyone else in the process.
But the negatives got to be too much, in the end. After an incredibly offensive footnote about how terrible trans* people are and essay after essay where it would have been so easy to bring race into the mix but instead white people were just assumed to be the default and the white experience was apparently everyone's experience in 1979, I had to put the book aside and let myself be incredibly frustrated. Because some good analysis isn't really worth it if you're going to run over everyone else in the process.
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