Changing Gender
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 25 Aug 2026
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself.
That gender is a hotly contested topic becomes ever clearer as antigender ideology continues to be mobilized by the far right and transgender people's lives are increasingly targeted. But what are we talking about when we talk about gender? Where did the concept itself come from, and where might it go?
In Changing Gender, the leading trans scholar Susan Stryker invites readers to ride along on her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the gender concept's roots in grammar and tells the story of how it transformed into a battleground of the culture wars. From the origins of “Yankee Doodle” to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, from nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, Stryker finds surprising places to tune in to the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies.
Poignant and deeply researched, lyrical and authoritative, Changing Gender is a book for our fraught time, exposing limiting assumptions about gender across the political spectrum and imagining what life might look like if some of those limitations were lifted. Ultimately, Stryker argues, to change gender is to change what it means to be human—and to change reality itself.
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.
