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Herrigel, E. (1953) Zen in the Art of Archery, trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Pantheon Books. Mauss, M. (1950) Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Miyamoto, M. (1993) The Book of Five Rings, including The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Munenori Yagyu, trans. T. Cleary. Boston: Shambhala Publications. Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sudnow, D. (1978) Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shun Inoue is Professor of Sociology at Konan Womens University, Japan.

Transgender
Constantina Papoulias
Keywords queer theory, transgender, transsexuality licenses the surgical manipulation of bodies so that their unruly materialities can be aligned with the transsexuals gender performance (Kessler and McKenna, 1978). A number of essays and booklength studies on transsexuality followed from there, arguing that transsexuality is a medicalization and pathologization of gender deviance. In these arguments, transsexuals were seen to collude with a hetero-normative medical establishment insofar as they were only able to obtain sex reassignment surgery if they could pass successfully through stereotyped gender performances, thus reinforcing the gender binary. In a celebrated 1991 article, transsexual activist academic Sandy Stone called for a resistance to the medicalized normalization of transsexuals and particularly for a refusal to erase their pre-op histories (Stone, 1991). On a similar note others clamoured for a rendering visible of discordant and uneasy histories of gendered embodiment as a retort to the normativity of gender scripts. Transgender activism became a site for the making visible of such discordant embodiments. The term transgender is usually traced to Virginia Prince, the head of Tri-Ess (a North American cross-dressers association): in the 1970s Prince coined the word transgenderist in order to differentiate between cross-dressing practices and the then emergent medicalized identity of the transsexual. In its 1990s activist reincarnation, transgender came to function as an umbrella term signifying gender non-conformity, so making possible a broad alliance among different gendervariant people, including cross-dressers and transsexuals (see Feinberg, 1992). In the context of postmodern critiques of identity, transgender activism forged a challenge to hegemonic gender binaries and their naturalizing force and invoked the possibility of fluid mobile and provisional enactments of gender. Known for her work on

he shifting fortunes of the term transgender since the early 1990s testify to the faultlines and methodological impasses in the theorization of gender across numerous disciplines. At the same time transgender marks the forging and transformation of alliances and collectivities in political activism. Transgender is one of the latest in a series of terms which, in the social sciences, have sought to name counter-normative materializations of gender on individual bodies, through practices of gender-crossing either in matters of dress and presentation, and/or in terms of body modification. Transgender is an umbrella term, which emerged partly in contestation to the hegemonic uses of the term transsexuality in both medical and social science discourse. Since the work of Harold Garfinkel, the study of transsexual experiences has become a kind of royal road for the theorization of gender as performance by sociologists espousing a version of what would gradually become identifiable as social constructionism. Garfinkels study of Agnes, a young male-to-female transsexual whom he believed to have been intersexual, was at the centre of his work on gender as a doing, a skilled choreography of micro-interactions (Garfinkel, 1967). Since Garfinkel, the observation of transsexuals doings of gender has allowed social scientists a privileged insight into the constructedness of normative gender performances. Feminist sociologists Kessler and McKenna used transsexuality to clinch the argument on the social enforcement of gender norms: for Kessler and McKenna, the diagnosis of transsexuality helps stabilize the social construction of gender and essentially

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female masculinities, queer theorist Judith (Jack) Halberstam claimed that the transgender body emerges . . . as futurity itself, a kind of heroic fulfillment of postmodern promises of gender flexibility (Halberstam, 2005: 18). Ironically, a lot of the emphasis on transgender practices as exemplifying the pluralization of gender comes from a very particular reading of the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler, herself a foundational reference in queer theory. As Kessler and McKenna had done, Butler argued that gender is performative, but she then also deconstructed the distinction between gender and the sexed body by suggesting that bodies are produced through uneven repetitions of gender discourses (Butler, 1990). However, in the circulation of her texts for trans activism, the compulsive and compulsory nature of such performances of gender was often dropped in favour of a vision of precisely those postmodern promises of gender flexibility of which Halberstam talks. Transgender studies have found particularly fertile ground in anthropology: here AngloAmerican anthropologists have scoured nonwestern cultures for the opportunities they allegedly provide for roles outside the gender binary. The best-studied examples are the berdache (or two-spirit people) in Native American cultures, the hijra in India, the kathoe in Thailand, the xanith of Oman, and the mahu in the Pacific islands (Herdt, 1996). References to such third-gender figures have found their way into popular literature where they frequently become decontextualized talismans for AngloAmerican transgender activists. Accordingly, while such anthropological research relativizes western hegemonic gender systems and challenges the innateness of gender categories, it has been critiqued for facilitating the appropriation of rich local cultural plots and doing violence to their lived reality, so that they may fit western agendas and preconceptions concerning third genders. While queer and postmodern theory is credited with the initiation of transgender activism and studies, a new generation of trans activists and academics are distancing themselves from the queer theoretical emphasis on the mobility and deconstruction of gender, claiming that such perspectives elide the materiality of trans bodies and the practices of embodiment which constitute trans experiences in their specificity. For Jay Prosser in particular, such theorizations of the transgender experience as a challenge to normative gendering ignore the strength and intransigence of what many transsexuals see as their true gender identity (Prosser, 1998). Indeed a flourishing ethnographic scholarship is currently beginning to chart the modalities of transgender embodiments (e.g. Ekins and King, 1999). Additionally, scholars across the humanities and social sciences are being drawn into the gravitational pull of neuroscience for ways of making sense of the materiality of gender. While neuroscience is generating new paradigms for our comprehension of embodied materiality, media coverage of neurobiological findings often works to reinforce a hetero-normative understanding of gender. Thus, the provisional findings of smallscale studies suggesting that gender is hormonally hard-wired in the structuration of the brain have gained enormous publicity and have been used to discredit the scholarship on the social construction of gender. The popularity of such findings notwithstanding, a turn to biology, as the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling has amply demonstrated, need not work as an essentializing gesture: rather than using biology as a bedrock which shores up sex dimorphism, Fausto-Sterling deploys developmental systems theory to argue that brain maps and behaviours are not inborn but emergent qualities, which develop relationally, as part of social systems (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). It remains to be seen how the emerging empirical work on trans experiences will respond to queer theorys earlier lionization of practices of transgendering. While queer theorists tended to see trans bodies as manifesting a pluralization of genders, Toril Moi has recently proposed that we eschew the term gender altogether for a phenomenological reading of embodiment as a series of situations in which we relate to the world in the concrete historical and experiencing body (Moi, 1999: 75). Some recent work on transgendered embodiment attempts to embrace both a phenomenological and a post-structuralist framework in order to do justice to trans lives. Henry Rubins study of female-to-male transsexuals, for example, attempts this difficult negotiation: in part of his study he discusses his subjects identities as an effect of hegemonic discourses around gender, while in the other part he listens to the ways in which they inhabit maleness as distinct from gender roles (Rubin, 2003). While new research on trans embodiment focuses on the materiality of embodiment either through neurobiology or through phenomenology, it is important too to reflect upon the psychological processes through which we invest our bodies with meaning. Psychoanalytic readings of transgender experiences have been roundly denounced by transgender activists as productive of pathologizing discourse, but this is perhaps too hasty a dismissal. While psychoanalysis has often been used to shore up hetero-normativity, psychoanalytic readings of transgendered subjectivity remind

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us of the unconscious phantasies which participate in our embodiment (see Dean, 2000). In so doing, they propose that embodiment, whether transgendered or not, is a process that no singular language (be it that of neurobiology, phenomenology, or indeed psychoanalysis itself) can fully translate. Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: New York University Press. Herdt, Gilbert H. (ed.) (1996) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone. Kessler, S.J. and W. McKenna (1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. New York: John Wiley. Moi, T. (1999) What is a Woman?, in What is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press Prosser, J. (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press. Rubin, H. (2003) Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Stone, S. (1991) The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, in J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds) Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge.

References
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge. Dean, T. (2000) Transcending Gender, in Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ekins, R. and D. King (1999) Towards a Sociology of Transgendered Bodies, Sociological Review http://www.ingenta connect.com/content/bpl/sore 47(3): 580602. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Feinberg, L. (1992) Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. New York: World View Forum. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, in Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Constantina Papoulias is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication at Middlesex University. She is currently working on conceptualizations of affect in the humanities and on religious attachments and globalization.

Body Image/Body without Image

Mike Featherstone
Keywords consumer culture, identity, movement, proprioception, reflexivity Against this sense of a docile body which can be reflexively monitored, disciplined and altered by the mind, there are those who advocate the investigation of the ways that the mind itself is embodied and delimited by the horizons of the flesh. Here our basic analytical conceptual knowledge of the world is seen as relying on metaphors which derive from bodily experience and which become embedded in language, suggesting the need to be aware of the body in the mind (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Yet if we think of the body as generative, the emphasis can shift to the bodys potential to vary, to be inventive, to be always in motion: as something that moves and feels (Massumi, 2002). This suggests that it is insufficient to see the body as merely a surface to be inscribed, as a carrier of social signs. The body is clearly a potential, in process and movement, something which goes beyond itself. Yet it is also understood as an

he double character of the human body has often been noted we are a body and we have a body; we see and are seen: our body is the platform from which we see the world and also an object in that world which is seen by others. This simple insight can be taken in a number of directions. On the one hand, this division of the seeing/seen can be used to retain a strong division between body and mind with the assumption that the body can be known and governed by the mind as in the metaphor of the body as a platform for seeing. It is assumed that the mind can actively marshal the body to facilitate the construction of a satisfactory body image which will enhance self-worth and self-identity.