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“A New Hope”: The Psychic Life of Passing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Abstract

In an examination of the psychological aspect of passing, this essay challenges Sandy Stone's conceptualization and subsequent request for transsexuals to forego the act. Employing an auto-ethnographical approach, this essay contends that considering the “psychic” dimensions of passing requires different, and more hopeful, articulations about transsexual bodies, such that gendered and racialized transsexual bodies are produced not simply in terms of social reading and physical embodiment, but also through psychic affirmation and disavowal.

Type
Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Hypatia, Inc.

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