Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality

Review

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 UniversityAssuming 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 LivesThe '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 UniversityFor 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 ― CurveSalomon's book achieves to be theoretically rigorous on issues of gender and embodiment and to acknowledge the specificity and reality of transgender experience in a way that challenges the reader to rethink conceptions of sex and gender at their cutting edge. ― Metapsychology...this original contribution reconfigures old questions and issues and engages with new ones, ultimately inviting us all to reconsider what it means to be embodied. ― Somatechnics...an important resource and instigation for future work along some very promising lines of thought. -- Tamsin Lorraine ― PhiloSOPHIA

About the Author

Gayle Salamon earned her Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.