Changing Gender
The History and Future of a Concept
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- Reserva
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- Lanzamiento previsto: 27 ago 2026
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- 16,99 €
Descripción editorial
Gender is one of the most contested topics of our age, as ideologies are weaponised by the far right and real trans lives are targeted. But what are we talking about when we talk about gender? What are the origins of the concept itself, and where might it take us in the future?
Rooted in decades of deep research and first-hand experience, Susan Stryker's sharp-eyed analysis invites us into her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. From nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracies to examples from her lifetime as an agenda setting historian, filmmaker and activist, Stryker finds surprising places to tune into the origins, idiosyncrasies and generative possibilities of the gender concept.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thought-provoking treatise, theorist Stryker (Gay Pulp) forges an alternative history of gender. The author's project derives from an unlikely source: attending a lecture by right-wing pundit Matt Walsh ("I prefer to focus my attention on whatever danger hurtles directly toward me," Stryker explains). Walsh presented a "misleading" history of gender that began with a focus on grammar, before turning to today's "gender ideology." Walsh's evocation of "grammatical gender" (think: much ballyhoo about pronouns) sends Stryker on a sweeping search to "untangl the mess of where gender came from," starting with the conventional understanding of gender as distinct from sex, established by psychologist John Money in the 1950s, and moving backward through Money's predecessors, among them anthropologist Margaret Mead and phrenologist Orson Fowler. Most intriguing is Stryker's discussion, à la Walsh, of gender as a grammatical principle, in which she probes at how language serves to forge collective realities. Throughout, Stryker veers into beguiling tangents, from "Yankee Doodle" as "a mockery of male effeminacy" to the trauma of trans feminists being booted from the women's spaces in 1970s Boston. She also examines her own experiences, including enduring "the ‘WTF' of being trans" as a child and grappling with being the subject of QAnon-adjacent conspiracies involving "extraterrestrial lizard people." While this meanders quite a bit, there's ample insight to be found.
