How should we understand transgenderism, especially as it affects children and adolescents? Psychiatric manuals include transgenderism among mental illnesses (Gender Identity Disorder). Such ...inclusion is relatively recent, and even the words transsexual and transgender were coined only a few decades ago. Yet stories of children with an in-between gender have always been, albeit symbolically, a part of popular culture. Drawing on fairy tales, as well as from personal narratives and clinical studies, this book explains how "Gender Identity Disorder" manifests in children, critically evaluating various clinical approaches and examining the ethical and legal issues surrounding the care and treatment of these youths. The book argues that Gender Identity Disorder is not pathology, and that medicine and society should assist children in expressing themselves, without attempting to force them to adapt to a gender that does not match with their perceived identity.
Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag ...opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century—when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category—Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.
'From time to time we listen to some curious views on psychoanalysis as an old fashioned and useless discipline, more important from an historical perspective than as a tool for understanding human ...life in its normal and pathological dimensions, as well as an effective therapeutic instrument. This book on transsexualism and transvestism shows exactly how psychoanalysis can reflect, discuss, dialogue and formulate useful insights on one of the most challenging situations that nowadays confront all members of the mental health community. The author assembled this group of distinguished analytic thinkers, all of them with deep experience in the field of human sexuality, and asked them to contribute both to the attempt of understanding these relatively new forms of expression of human sexuality and what kind of interrelations psychoanalysis can offer. My own experience in the supervision of analytic psychotherapy with these patients shows me how simultaneously difficult and fascinating is the journey of each analyst or therapist who attempts to treat those patients.
Body Panic Dworkin, Shari; Wachs, Faye
02/2009
eBook
Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal - not just thin but toned, not just ...muscular but cut - that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be "fit"? And how is it that having an unfit, or "bad," body gets conflated with being an unfit, or "bad," citizen?Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men's and women's health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are "made" in today's culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women's and men's bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
