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SALLY HINES'S TRANSFORMING GENDER: TRANSGENDER PRACTICES OF IDENTITY, INTIMACY, AND CARE, BRISTOL, U.K.: POLICY PRESS, 2007
JULIA HORNCASTLE
Well balanced and refreshingly sensible, Transforming Gender is a critical and insightful book. It aims to "contribute to the development of a sociology of transgender" (6) and avoids privileging unitary perspectives on trans- issues. To emphasize the diffuse everyday realities of trans- subjectivity, Sally Hines casts empirical research findings alongside recent social and cultural trans- theories to explore how broad understandings of transphenomena can be further developed. Hines's further aim is to privilege a sharper focus on issues such as intimacy, identity, parenting, partnership, friendship, and citizenship.
Transforming Gender discusses a range of gender identities and experiences that Hines locates under the umbrella term "transgender." This term is used throughout the book to broadly signify "practices and identities such as transvestism, transsexuality, intersex, gender queer, female and male drag, cross-dressing and some butch/femme practices" (1).
The empirical material is U.K. focused, although a range of contemporary Western perspectives (for example, Butler, Feinberg, Halberstam, Foucault, Grosz, Walby, Bourdieu) informs the theoretical basis of the book. Non-U.K. and non-Western perspectives would, as Hines notes, produce different findings. These are not explored, and the book is very clearly defined in terms of Hines's own exclusive research, although she does gesture toward some perspectives of identity and community that are non-Western,...