Friday, March 23rd 9:25 am at the Southern Sociological Society’s Annual Meeting, Kristen Schilt will be meeting the critics of her latest book Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality from University of Chicago Press.
This session should be great. The book has already received a number of great reviews and it is extremely interesting and useful, in my opinion, in considering the social construction vs essentialist debates related to sex and gender in American society. Further, this book really highlights the strength of masculine privilege and malleability of social tolerance when people fit into boxes via the “unique experiences” of transmen in the work place.
The social psychologist in me further likes how it illustrates the significance of one’s appearance (or how I like to think about it what is known or what is considered to be “true” of an individual by society or those in power over this individual) in the life of a transmen especially as related to the influence and opportunities afforded to them.
I hope we also get a few questions in this session with Schilt. If so I am going to start off with how does appearance compare to presentation for these guys? I bet Goffman would suggest appearance would be part of presentation but not all of it. I feel like I can also guess for Schilt…by why guess when you can ask directly.
