دانلود کتاب Becoming and Be/Longing: Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook

It is perhaps only fitting that one of the key tenets of autobiography criticism at the dawn of the new millennium--that we become subjects through the workings of a constituting social order within which, however, we can still exercise agency and self-determination--should echo the teachings of the ancients. A Midrashic commentary of the seventh century has it that "a man is called by three names: one given him by his father and mother, one that others call him, and one that he calls himself." 1 Here are two contemporary autobiographical articulations of this logic of self-naming. "I am neither man nor woman," affirms Michael Hernandez in a short self-portrait included in Leslie Feinberg's TransLiberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, "I just am" (76). And in her Foreword to the collection Boys Like Her: Transfictions, Kate Bornstein reflects on the pain she would have been spared if, as a youngster, she could have simply told the world: "'I'm a girl, but I'm a boy, I am'" (11). The texts by Hernandez and Bornstein foreground issues of vital interest to contemporary autobiography studies: the "existential necessity" of having a sense of self--of affirming "I am"--and the function of self-narration as a medium of/for such self-creation (Eakin 46); the range of culturally and historically specific "vocabularies of the self" through which subjects are constituted (Bjorklund 7); and the possibility that a subject so constructed...