Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon (review)

Written in lucid and elegant prose, Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality makes paradigm-shifting contributions to transgender studies, to feminist theories of sexual difference, and to psychoanalytic and phenomenological work on embodiment. Salamon argues that, despite the understandable political desire to root transsexual identity in the materiality of the body, transgender studies stands to gain much from psychoanalytic and phenomenological accounts of bodily materiality as something that is never merely factual or fully knowable. Attending to the ways in which bodily materiality is accessed through matrices of gendered social power, she demonstrates how practices of erotic relationality and chiastic crossings between social meaning and internal feeling can yield a non-pathologizing account of transgender embodiment that foregrounds the importance of an ethics of sexed relationality.

Part One mines psychoanalytic and phenomenological thinkers such as Didier Anzieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Kaja Silverman for a non-pathologizing theory of transgender embodiment as a play between bodily substance and immaterial feeling. Part Two challenges both feminism’s failure to keep pace with non-normative genders as they are currently being lived and the investment, at play in transgender studies work by authors such as Jay Prosser and Jason Cromwell, in the autonomy of the agential transgender or transsexual subject. Salamon’s account of social construction theory is capacious enough to do justice to a range of non-normative experiences of sexed embodiment without jettisoning the social structures that, feminists argue, give meaning to gender in the first place. Part Three offers critical readings of writings by feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz that posit sexual difference as the absolute limit of the cultural pliability of bodily meaning. Salamon’s queer critique repurposes Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference in order to conceive of an ethical relation to non-gender normative others that would neither annihilate them nor cordon them off into absolute unknowability. The book concludes with a reading of Jan Morris’s transsexual autobiography, Conundrum, that critiques the way in which, for transgender and transsexual people, sex is defined as state, rather than private or bodily property.

Assuming a Body demonstrates the saliency of the field of transgender studies by displaying the generative effects of readings canonical texts in philosophy, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist theory with multiply sexed differences in mind. Salamon misses several opportunities, however, to expand her theory of embodied differences to consider racialized, geographic, and historical differences that are of growing import to work in transgender studies. Readers would also have benefitted from a clearer explanation of the book’s turn to Irigaray and sexual difference theory in Part Three. These concerns are outweighed by the book’s major strengths: its deft guidance of the reader through the intricacies of theory, its ability to zero in on the crux of debates between feminist and transgender studies, and its gift for opening theory up to more capacious conceptions of sexed difference. Within the fields of transgender and feminist studies, the effects of Assuming a Body’s timely and important interventions will continue to be felt for years to come.