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Middlesex: A Novel
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. .
Price: $3.25
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Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)
"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 "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. .
Price: $8.71
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Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite)
With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris. Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality. "Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary."Le Monde, July 1978.
Price: $9.49
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Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
Punctuated with remarkable case studies, this book explores extraordinary encounters between hermaphrodites--people born with "ambiguous" sexual anatomy--and the medical and scientific professionals who grappled with them. Alice Dreger focuses on events in France and Britain in the late nineteenth century, a moment of great tension for questions of sex roles. While feminists, homosexuals, and anthropological explorers openly questioned the natures and purposes of the two sexes, anatomical hermaphrodites suggested a deeper question: just how many human sexes are there? Ultimately hermaphrodites led doctors and scientists to another surprisingly difficult question: what is sex, really? Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex takes us inside the doctors' chambers to see how and why medical and scientific men constructed sex, gender, and sexuality as they did, and especially how the material conformation of hermaphroditic bodies--when combined with social exigencies--forced peculiar constructions. Throughout the book Dreger indicates how this history can help us to understand present-day conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality. This leads to an epilogue, where the author discusses and questions the protocols employed today in the treatment of intersexuals (people born hermaphroditic). Given the history she has recounted, should these protocols be reconsidered and revised? A meticulously researched account of a fascinating problem in the history of medicine, this book will compel the attention of historians, physicians, medical ethicists, intersexuals themselves, and anyone interested in the meanings and foundations of sexual identity. .
Price: $19.66
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Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude
Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of "normal.”.
Price: $7.35
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In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite
This book is an account of the first great triumph of genomics: the thirty-year struggle to decode the complete DNA of a nematode worm. Success in this was what made the human genome project possible. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM is an exciting but scrupulous account of a genuine scientific triumph, which will delight both those who know the subject and those who don't. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM tells of some remarkable characters who have changed our approach to science irrevocably, among them Sydney Brenner, a heroic dreamer who first thought of understanding an animal as a sort of biological Meccano; John Sulston, his first post-doctoral student, who managed to raise GBP30 million; his friend, Bob Horvitz, who has, to all intents and purposes, spent more than thirty years studying the 22 cells of a worm's vulva; and Fred Sanger, the only man to have won two Nobel Prizes in the same discipline. Decades of painstaking research triumphed in 1998, when this worm was the first creature to have all its DNA mapped -- but now what? We still don't know how to build a single worm. In this intriguing story of dreams and disillusionment, Andrew Brown contemplates the next fifty years of biological science, and the way that ignorance expands to surround all available knowledge..
Price: $11.79
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In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite
The fascinating story of the quest to decode how a creature works in its entirety A tiny transparent nematode worm only half a millimeter long has been the subject of intensive study by a select group of biologists since the early 1960s culminating in the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to the main protagonists. The voyage of discovery has been arguably one of the most important quests in modern biology and has stimulated much of modern thinking about genetics, development and neurobiology. .
Price: $55.62
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Looking Beyond the Mountains
This is the story of how Linda Jean Hammond became Steven Hammond after surgery to correct a genital birth defect. Labeled female at birth, Steven Hammond lived for 25 years as a female -- a boy imprisoned in the trappings of a girl. This is the story of the life of Linda Jean and the birth of Steven at age 25..
Price: $10.71
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The Hermaphrodite (Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers)
Written in the 1840s and recently published for the first time, Julia Ward Howe’s novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time—or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man and is loved by men and women alike, yet can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the realization “that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them.” Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a sixteen-year-old boy, his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman and his sisters, and his ultimate reunion with his early love. His is a story unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming-of-age at odds with one’s culture. (20070212).
Price: $17.95
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The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir (Green Integer)
"Singularly original and captivating... an important work of fiction that should transform what notions of fiction may currently exist." --Luis J. Rodriguez "[A] collage of satire and slapstick, allegory and hallucination... an " art novel" in the fullest sense." --Marguerite Feitlowitz "A modern space-time set of interconnected myths and stories... startling sets of shape shiftings and melting tableaus... elegantly precise... graceful... a work of art." --Ed Sanders "Daniel Grandbois has magicked up for us in this powerfully inventive... gloriously odd and wonderful [book]." --Laird Hunt Praise for Unlucky Lucky Days, a Book Sense "Indie Next Notable Book":
"These are funny, bizarre, moving stories--a pleasure to read." --Lydia Davis "Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits." --Brian Evenson "Grandbois' trembling leaflets bring to life all the rejecta and detritus scattered in such silent and secretive array around us, recovering all we thought lost or dead." --Eleni Sikelianos "Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious." --Rikki Ducornet.
Price: $11.16
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