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The Transgender Studies Reader. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds. New York: Routledge. 2006. 752 pages. $95.00.
The growing interdisciplinary field of transgender studies is well represented by the new Transgender Studies Reader. Instructors of transgender issues until now have had to use a combination of obscure sources in hard to find places to teach the basics of this growing field. However, this lucid, well organized reader may solve that problem for both instructors and researchers within transgender studies; this reader may also play a key role in the solidification of transgender studies as a coherent field of study. In her introduction from "the study of transgender phenomena" (p. 3), Stryker establishes the roots of transgender studies in the social sciences and humanities, along with the close connections between transgender community and academic research. Both of these characteristics are well reflected in this anthology.
The first three sections of this reader locate transgender studies within sexology, feminist studies, and queer theory. The first section of the book focuses on sex, gender and science, primarily the connections between classical sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld and more contemporary work such as Donna Haraway's piece on cyborg studies. The inclusion...