A review by ralowe
Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon

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.