When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

Susan Stryker, edited by McKenzie Wark. Duke Univ., $25.95 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-4780-3047-8

Wark (Raving), a media studies professor at the New School, shines a spotlight on a leading voice in trans studies in this collection of trenchant essays by Stryker (Transgender History). In “Perfect Day,” Stryker recounts realizing as a young child that she didn’t identify as a boy and laments that it took years for her to embrace the trans label because she didn’t see herself in the prevailing psychiatric descriptions of trans individuals as “deeply disturbed people who feared being homosexual.” Several pieces explore the San Francisco queer and kink communities in which Stryker has spent much of her life. For example, the essay “Dungeon Intimacies” reflects on how, in the 1990s, the city’s sadomasochism scene provided “a mechanism for dismembering and disarticulating received patterns of identification, affect, sensation, and appearance.” Stryker provides a bracing assessment of frictions within the LGBTQ movement, criticizing cis gay and lesbian individuals who seek to secure a place in mainstream society by excluding trans people. Some of the most powerful entries are the most personal, as when Stryker writes of the affinity she feels with Frankenstein’s monster: “Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face and redefine a life worth living.” The result is a salient introduction to the work of an essential queer thinker. (July)