Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Grace Elisabeth Lavery, "Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Description: In Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023), Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one's sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both anti-trans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms "tr...