Richard Ekins

Towards a Sociology of Transgendered Bodies

The articulation of a generic social process of ‘body femaling’ presented in Ekins (1993) and elaborated in Ekins (1997) is further developed in this article to provide a conceptual framework for a sociology of transgendered bodies. Transgendering refers both to the idea of moving across (transferring) from one pre-existing gender category to another (either temporarily or permanently), and to the idea of transcending or living ‘beyond gender’ altogether. Following Plummers (1995) work on sexual stories, we distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering body stories which we consider in terms of four major modes or styles of body transgendering: those we identify as ‘migrating’, ‘oscillating’, ‘erasing’ and ‘transcending’. We give illustrative examples of each mode with reference to the binary male/female divide, the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender, and the interrelations between the four main sub-processes of transgendering, which we identify as ‘substituting’, ‘concealing’, ‘implying’ and ‘redefining’.

Telling body transgendering stories

This chapter re-frames our earlier work on cross-dressing and sex- changing in terms of the ‘narrative turn’ (Maines 1993; Maines and Ulmer 1993) in contemporary social science and cultural theory. Elsewhere, we have analyzed two decades of fieldwork, life history work, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers in terms of a qualitative sociology and social psychology principally indebted to symbolic interactionism, historical analysis and grounded theory (for example, Ekins 1983; 1993; 1997; King 1981; 1993; Ekins and King 1996a; 1998). Here, we draw upon Plummer’s work on ‘sexual stories’ (Plummer 1995; 1996) in order to consider contemporary transgender diversity in terms of a number of conceptually distinct ‘narratives of transgendering’ that we have discerned in our research into contemporary cross-dressing and sex-changing in Western Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer

SUMMARY This article gives an overview of the life and work of Virginia Prince. It provides a synopsis of her major publications, situates her work in the context of its time and assesses her contribution as a major pioneer of transgendering.