| View Larger Image | Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) | Paperbackby Thea Hillman (Author)
| List Price: | $14.95 | | Price: | $11.66 | | You Save: | $3.29 (22%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Manic D Press, Inc. | | Page Count: | 160 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 01, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 279,005th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9781933149240
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
“In Hillman’s world, the surer you become about who you are, the more vulnerable you get.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian “Hillman’s writing is sexy because it’s smart and refuses to simplify things.”—Fabula Magazine "Hillman's utterly unabashed memoir...showcases both the personal, embodied realities of intersex, and the social and political milieus that shape them... Intersex, too, is gorgeously written."—Women's Review of Books "It's utterly impossible to not be spellbound by performer-activist Thea Hillman, in person or in print ... A must-read."—Curve “There’s nothing else in print like this amazing and courageous book.”—Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism “An important and wonderfully disarming book. Poetic, political, and deeply personal.”—Beth Lisick, author of Helping Me Help Myself Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) chronicles one person’s search for self in a world obsessed with normal. What is “intersex”? According to the Intersex Society of North America, the word describes someone born with sex chromosomes, genitalia, or an internal reproductive system that are neither clearly male nor clearly female. In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Thea Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community. Whether she’s pondering quirky family tendencies (“Drag”), reflecting on “queerness” (“Another”), or recounting scintillating adventures in San Francisco’s sex clubs, Hillman’s brave and fierce vision for cultural and societal change shines through. According to a special report by the Traditional Values Coalition entitled “Homosexual Urban Myth,” award-winning writer Thea Hillman is a radical who conducts erotic readings to promote the “homosexual revolution.” Thea offers presentations about sex and gender and performs her work at colleges and festivals around the country. She lives in Oakland, California. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 3 reviews)
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This a beautiful book by lilycat (San Francisco)  5 Stars
March 05, 2009
This us an amazing. It is so honest, raw, and heartfelt. All the stories were not only real but poetic. I learned a lot about Intersex, but the lessons taught were not heavy handed. It was a very enjoyable read.
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Thea Hillman is brilliant! by Shannon Perez-darby (Seattle, WA) 5 Stars
October 13, 2008
Thea's newest book is breathtaking, brutally honest and completely awe inspiring. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. The pieces in this book all come together to create the kind of brilliance that fills me up. It's so hard to present ourselves as whole, complex, complete people and Thea Hillman does this in one of the smartest ways I've seen.
I've been telling everyone I know to buy this book. This is the kind of book that all the queers should be reading and many probably are. I think everyone should read Intersex: For Lack of A Better Word including my mom, my sister, my co-workers, lovers and friends. In short, Thea Hillman is brilliant!
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Buy this book by David S. Hall (Stockton, CA USA) 5 Stars
September 22, 2008
As a sexuality educator, I have some familiarity with the world of Intersex people. I have loved them, cried with them, rejoiced with them, mourned their death, and heard many of their deepest stories. When I read this book, my heart cried, and I learned a lot more than my text books tell me about gender identity.
I probably met Thea Hillman in San Francisco in the early 90's, we seem to have attended a few of the same events, but I have no specific recollection of her. Now I feel I know her well. She bares her soul in the many chapters of this (sort of) diary. She speaks of her experiences as a young child, being diagnosed with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, and what that experience meant to a four year old girl who was growing pubic hairs, a child who was poked and examined by many doctors, and had a total lack of personal privacy of her body. She comes back to this experience many times in the stories she tells of her life as a person who does not really know what gender she is. She speaks about her "outwardly simple though visually misleading, internally complicated gender." She speaks of her mother's prayers that she would be normal. She speaks of normal this way:
"I take the war on terror personally because the war on terror is really a war on difference, because my body strikes terror in the hearts of other Americans.
"My body and the bodies of the people I love are the most intimate sites of American imperialism. Because our sex anatomy isn't normal, they operate on us without our consent. Because who we have sex with isn't normal, they won't let us get married. Because our gender isn't normal, they don't give us jobs, health care, or housing. We work, we pay rent, we pay taxes, but because we're not normal, we don't get the same freedoms other Americans enjoy, the same freedoms American soldiers are murdering to protect.
"Normal is a weapon of mass destruction. It's just as deadly, and just like those weapons, it'll never be found"
Thea has served on the Board of Mills College and as the Board Chair of the Intersex Society of North America and been a spokesperson for the Intersex community, yet she says:
"When it comes to talking about trans and queer community, there are a whole bunch of things I can't say. In fact, it's much easier to think about what I can't say than what I want to say. Things I can't say because I will piss someone off: no generalizations, of course, about anything, but specifically, and most dangerously, no generalizations about transmen, transwomen, butches, femmes, genderqueers, or intersex people.
"I fear that regardless of the fact that I've been hormonally altered since age six in order to achieve and maintain a mythical gender ideal, I can't safely talk about my concerns about hormones and surgery in our community for fear of being seen as anti-trans and anti-surgery"
Thankfully, she manages to cover all these areas in her many short chapters, mostly from a very intensely personal perspective, using the "I" voice. She talks frankly and specifically about sex, her feelings and her behavior. She speaks of lovers and hot partners and really interesting parties, but all from the perspective of one who does not clearly know what she/he is all about internally. The gender identity confusion comes through in many ways. She is also able to share with us some of the experiences of people in her life. We become, if we choose, one of her intimate friends.
This is the book for anyone who is interested in Intersex as an educational or theraputic topic, is gender curious, is gender confused or just likes to see what a talented writer can do with such a personal subject. The far right calls her a radical who promotes the "homosexual revolution." I call her courageous.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
by Katrina Karkazis (Author)
What happens when a baby is born with "ambiguous" genitalia or a combination of "male" and "female" body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are confronted with complicated questions such as whether a girl can have XY chromosomes, or whether some penises are "too small" for a male sex assignment. Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant's genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates...
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| Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self
by Sharon E. Preves (Author)
Approximately one in every two thousand infants born in the United States each year is sexually ambiguous in such a way that doctors cannot immediately determine the child’s sex. Some children’s chromosomal sexuality contradicts their sexual characteristics. Others have the physical traits of both sexes, or of neither. Drawing upon life history interviews with adults who were treated for intersexuality as children, Sharon E. Preves explores how such individuals experience and cope...
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| Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
by Anne Fausto-Sterling (Author)
This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture...
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| Stone Butch Blues: A Novel
by Leslie Feinberg (Author)
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? That's the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950's, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist '60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a...
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| Lessons from the Intersexed
by Suzanne J. Kessler (Author)
Focusing on intersexuality - having physical gender markers that are neither female or male - the author examines the social institutions that are mobilized to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. She argues that we need to re-think the meaning of gender, genitals and sexuality.
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