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The Word is OutI loved this anthology. I found the overall quality of Self-Organizing Men to be superior.
This book really made think about being trans. I like how there are different types of masculinity covered and all of them are okay. There is no push to have transsexual be better than transgender or vice versa. Plus, Tim'm West is a bio-man and that really makes the discussions of masculinity and feminism much richer. This book really helped me understand myself a little better.
I found Self-Organizing Men to be funny, challenging, emotional, and educational. I am the parent of a FTM guy: a son who is wonderful in every way. But I must admit that despite years of PFLAG I just did not 'understand' what he and others had experienced, felt, and endured. Not on a gut level anyway. This book finally let me understand that our bodies are not our gender and that love, sex, and yes, happiness lie where your mind and emotions tell you they belong. I recommend this book unreservedly for anyone who loves someone who is transgendered, intersexed, genderqueer, FTM, or just questioning.
Self-Organizing Men challenges the binary of gender and makes me think about how my own male privilege plays itself out in my everyday life. It makes me reconsider what it takes to really be a man and the insanity of our social construction of gender. As a professor of social work specializing in diversity and social justice, I would highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to expand their definition of masculinity and to better understand the FTM experience in a deeply emotional way. At the same time, the book's use of humor makes this the kind of book that will make you laugh and cry at the same time!
Jay Sennett? new anthology, Self-Organizing Men, represents an ambitious effort to grapple with issues of social privilege, cultural assumptions, and public presentation, versus personal subjectivity among trans-masculine individuals and transgender communities.
Self-Organizing Men look(s) beyond biology to find how we define ourselves, our bodies, spirit, and gender.
If you care about gender, read this book. Be ready to have your preconceived notions, even if you developed them in women? or gender studies classrooms, challenged. And encourage Jay to publish more like this.
I thought it was a nice mix of academic work, personal essays, what I think is a poem, artwork, a dialogue, and probably other bits I have forgotten. Being self centric, I really was interested in parts that I had personally experienced. By which I mean once I saw Scott Turner Scofield do a performance(and once he taught our gay history class) and so I thought smuggly that Emory let him by with only a few warnings around the area about how the show might contain nudity, and also, I saw a picture of Nick? cute baby on the interweb, so followed his story about transmotherhood with interest.But don? get me wrong. The voices I hadn? heard before interested me too. I? reading an essay called Trans Incoherence now and think it should be photocopied and handed out in women? studies classrooms. I mean, the teacher should buy a copy of course! Then again, maybe the students should all buy their own copies? Yea, that? the ticket.
Wow. Drinking my first cuppa this a.m., as part of my toying around with the project of being a gay man (Janet Halley reference) and ?aking a break from feminism for awhile, I decided to read the introduction to Self-Organizing Men , an anthology of essays, images, and poetry from transmen edited by Jay Sennett. What an inspiring introduction!
Just got my copy of Self-Organizing Men edited by Jay Sennett today, and I am hyper with the drug of smart good ideas & philosophizing!Highlights:
(1) I must admit, I wasn't expecting the anthology to include somebody with a bio-cock. and I love, love, love that it did! It makes the space safer for me to be there in the same way that when I had all-girl body-painting parties in the 90s I always included at least one boy defining a space more broadly makes it safer for mixed-race genderfuckers like myself?/em> (2) Reading this quote out loud in a coffee shop got me big smiles from the interracial boy-girl couple at the next table over.
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