Comments on: Book Selection of the Month: “The First Man-Made Man” by Pagan Kennedy (Updated with hermaphrodite twin and foot-nipple)

By: ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » The Pagan Kennedy (et al) Guide to CONQUERING ALL MEDIA

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:03:22 +0000

[...] Tonight at 6:30, Pagan Kennedy reads at the Mid-Manhattan Library (40th and Fifth) from her book The First Man-Made Man (which was winner of the prestigious ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for April 2007), about the first woman to become a man through surgery. [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:55:31 +0000

Thank You

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:34:37 +0000

Of course, there are many women — post-mastectomy cancer survivors, generally — who have breast implants that are indeed considered “prostheses” (or “forms,” which is language you tend to see in specialty-swimwear catalogs). I imagine that these women choose breast implants not to enhance themselves sexually but to restore the normative aesthetic symmetry of their recovering bodies.

By: Alyssa

Alyssa — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 05:05:00 +0000

Your reaction _is_ basically aesthetic, but I suppose it’s fair to say that most people who object for aesthetic reasons (texture, hang, etc.) aren’t _consciously_ thinking “medical prostheses.”

But I’m sure most women would assert that Captain Hook is sexy precisely _because_ of the steel hook-hand. On the other hand (no pun intended), the crocodile who swallowed an alarm clock really did himself a disservice; but I guess that’s more of a pragmatic issue.

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 05:11:57 +0000

Well, I suppose this is basically aesthetic, but the idea of them just screams “prostheses” to me, which makes them sort of “medical” in my brain, which in turn makes them unsexy in the same way that a splint or a steel hook-hand would be — which is not by any means to say one couldn’t be a sexy person with a hook-hand, but I wouldn’t regard the hook-hand as a _plus_, nor the fluid-filled fake spheres where only breasts were expected. (I’m guessing most people with strong aesthetic objections to them merely think of them as tacky, not slightly-disturbing as I do.)

By: Alyssa

Alyssa — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:54:12 +0000

Wait: what are your slightly different than normal reasons for being disturbed by breast implants?

(‘Cause the most typical reasons I know of are aesthetic, feminist, and health-related.)

By: Alyssa

Alyssa — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:44:17 +0000

This is well said, and I was also thinking something pretty close to what Christine put into words. A recent Voice future on the emergence of transgendered children (a phenomenon whose relative novelity poses a bunch of questions about the the degree to which the intersection of how we configure gender and how our acceptance of body modification has changed conservative theories of childhood gender), whose parents are considering surgery and hormone therapy for their grade school-age kids, makes cultural norms rather than the children’s needs seem like greater impetus for surgery.

I dunno, though. Not feeling at home in one’s (gendered) body has to be incredibly difficult. And how mutable _are_ primary sex characteristics (since this feeling of _lack_ is often so central to trans people’s decision to undergo surgery)?

By: Christopher

Christopher — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:01:04 +0000

And if I recall correctly, Gurdjieff was admired by Annie Hall as well. This reminds me of the line “Why don’t you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider,” which is funny.

By: chuck

chuck — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 02:23:58 +0000

And let us not forget the South Park episode, Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina, wherein “negroplasty” and later “dolphinoplasty” raise trans-race and trans-species issues in a somewhat delightfully less subtle way. :)

By: Christine

Christine — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:30:12 +0000

Gurdjieff is also admired by Peter Murphy.

You haven’t said it so bluntly, so I will: the extent to which transsexuality endorses more conservative theories of gender as biologically constituted and not those of gender as performance. Your question about whether Dillon would need surgery today approaches this, of course. I was fascinated by an episode of *The L Word* (which treats sexuality with all the delicacy and sophistication of a medieval mace) I saw recently in which the transsexual character Max (FTM) expressed his need for a urinating dildo-apparatus by saying “I’ve just always wanted to whip it out” and piss in a urinal. Oh, okay. Does the desire to “whip it out” really express radical dissonance between personhood/”who I really am” (defined how?) and the biological characteristics of sex, rather than simply a psychological attraction to particular manifestations of the mutable trappings of gender?