Theorizing Transgender Embodiments

Abstract

Gayle Salamon's Assuming Body is brilliant book that marks an important milestone in theorizing transgendered embodiments. Chapter 1 develops reading psychoanalytic concept ego, which Salamon finds of partic - ular use in thinking transgender because it shows that which one has 'felt sense' is not necessarily contiguous with physical as it is perceived from outside (14). She positions her reading bodily ego as correction to Jay Prosser's Second Skins, which uses that concept to locate materiality transsexual bodies as prediscursive. 1 Aligning most closely with Paul Schilder and Kaja Silverman, Salamon insists that the constituent parts cannot be thought as biologically given prior to their assemblage by schema, which serves as a mediating entity between self and world and renders accessible only through psychical mediation (30). In chapter 2, Salamon turns to Maurice Merleau- Ponty's phenomenology to argue that our lived experiences embodiment emerge through desire and proprioception in relational space between self and other. This is ground- breaking move, for it allows Salamon to account for embodiments across spec- trum transgendered identities, rather than follow Prosser in privileging trans- sexuality. Merleau- Ponty's distinction between body and proves useful for understanding moment in film Boys Don't Cry at which Lana Tisdell declares that she knows that Brandon Teena is man because she has seen him in full flesh (58). Here Lana recognizes defined not by body's material contours but by Brandon's felt experience male embodiment. Salamon's