Second Skins

What is the relationship between the social and physical transitions of transsexuality and the narrative? And how can the link between somatic and symbolic ultimately deepen our understanding of transsexuality itself? This book examines the power of autobiographical narrative in interpreting transsexuality.

Focusing on the union of body and narrative, the author conveys how transsexuality has been moulded by autobiographical acts. The book argues that the transsexual body—as a historical subject and the histories of individual transsexual subjects—is empowered by narrative.

In the first part of the book, Prosser focuses on identity and bodily integrity, turning to the work of Judith Butler—who presents the homosexual theory view of the transgendered body—and Prosser's own theory of the transsexual body.

The second part centres on narratives, including a critical recasting of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness into a transsexual novel and the study of transgender and trans-genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, as well as lesser-known autobiographies.

The book ends with photographs showing the transsexual body. These images cut through the barriers between body and language and poststructuralist thinking focused on the materiality of the human body.