Search results for ""author jay prosser""

A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It's a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don't associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities.Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Read more less

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality. His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought. The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals--poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.

Read more less

The Well of Loneliness-the Radclyffe Hall novel at times referred to as "the bible of lesbianism"-was released in Britain in 1928 and was immediately controversial. Pronounced obscene following a sensational trial, the book has become a cultural icon as well as a source of considerable debate, especially among feminists, lesbians, and transgendered persons. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle. Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as race, the nation at war, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as new pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle. Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as fetishism, inversion, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity.

Read more less