Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Sally Hines' book is an articulate and worthy contribution to what she calls a queer sociology of transgender. Bringing together empirical research with political, feminist, trans, queer and educational literature, she lays out a specifically sociological analysis of transgender experiences and debates. The book's strengths lie in its clear presentation of the topic and its UK focus, which builds upon research done primarily in the United States and Australia.
Throughout the book, Hines maintains an explicit focus on the lived experiences of her research participants. She successfully presents both the convergences and diversity of these experiences, while maintaining an analytic perspective that contextualises these experiences within wider debates in feminist and queer theory. She constantly tackles the paradox often seen in academic work on transgender of responding to the materially lived experience of transgender people and poststructural critiques, which seem to suggest that transgender identities offer potentially infinite possibilities for gendered and sexual transgression. Her analysis instead suggests an 'emphasis upon identity transgression accompanied by attentiveness to the lived experiences within multiple subject positions' (p. 84).
She explores these multiple subject positions through an analysis of trans people's experiences...