Published in 2014, Manning Up is a collection of personal essays by transgender men. Taken as a whole, the collection represents new ground in the field of transgender life writing. While memoir and autobiography by and about transgender people can be traced back at least as far as the 1960s, the genre is constituted mostly by full-length autobiographies by a single author––such as Christine Jorgenson: A Personal Autobiography, Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger, and Jameson Green’s Becoming a Visible Man. Each of these works is considered a landmark within the genre, however, an anthology that incorporates many diverse transgender voices offers a new avenue for understanding transgender experience. While each author in Manning Up
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Alexander writes that the class discussion centered around a “deceptively simple set of questions: What is a man? Is Patrick Califia-Rice a “real” man? How can we tell?” (46). Each of these questions addresses some of the key tensions surrounding postmodern understandings of gender and subjectivity, and “how gender comes to be defined in relation to biology, cultural norms, social roles and even political assumptions about the organization of the species” (Alexander 46). These questions are also implicitly addressed in Manning Up, because the gendered self is so important thematically to the essays. Each author finds that he must compose a purposely gendered self on the page that conveys to the reader that he is, in fact, “a real man.” In Alexander’s example, all but one of his students was able to accept Califia “as a man,” (46) because of Califia’s “highly-conscious and purposeful self-fashioning” …show more content…
Often, this comes in the form of a youthful rebellion against traditional gender roles enforced by parents––generally mothers. In, “Standing On the Precipice” for example, Emmett Troxel refers to the dresses and skirts required by his childhood school as “girl shackles” (118) and recalls feeling “out-of-place” and unlike “the other girls” (118). When he is allowed to begin wearing boy’s clothing, he remembers feeling more like himself (119). This story of childhood clashes with parents and authority over clothing is one that is echoed across several of the collection’s essays, such as Jack Sito’s “New Territory” in which he
Alexander writes that the class discussion centered around a “deceptively simple set of questions: What is a man? Is Patrick Califia-Rice a “real” man? How can we tell?” (46). Each of these questions addresses some of the key tensions surrounding postmodern understandings of gender and subjectivity, and “how gender comes to be defined in relation to biology, cultural norms, social roles and even political assumptions about the organization of the species” (Alexander 46). These questions are also implicitly addressed in Manning Up, because the gendered self is so important thematically to the essays. Each author finds that he must compose a purposely gendered self on the page that conveys to the reader that he is, in fact, “a real man.” In Alexander’s example, all but one of his students was able to accept Califia “as a man,” (46) because of Califia’s “highly-conscious and purposeful self-fashioning” …show more content…
Often, this comes in the form of a youthful rebellion against traditional gender roles enforced by parents––generally mothers. In, “Standing On the Precipice” for example, Emmett Troxel refers to the dresses and skirts required by his childhood school as “girl shackles” (118) and recalls feeling “out-of-place” and unlike “the other girls” (118). When he is allowed to begin wearing boy’s clothing, he remembers feeling more like himself (119). This story of childhood clashes with parents and authority over clothing is one that is echoed across several of the collection’s essays, such as Jack Sito’s “New Territory” in which he