Synopses & Reviews
Nonfiction. Transsexuality answers to the dream of pushing back, or even eliminating altogether, the limits marking the frontiers of reality. The male transsexual, who claims to have a woman's soul imprisoned in a man's body, and who often demands correction of this "error" through surgery, is perhaps the only believer in a monolithic sexual identity free of doubts and questions. The female transsexual reverses this equation, seeking to identify with the prerogatives - and even organs - of male power. Sexual difference and its discontents owes much to the cultural interplay of fantasy and reality, dominance and transgression, and the questions that put each of us in touch with what makes us strangers to ourselves.
Synopsis
In the heyday of the sixties, during a seven-year stay in the Himalayas, Marilyn Stablein taught herself not only how to cook a curry on a cow-dung patty fire, but to master sadhu rituals like preparing chillums. Whether describing Mishra's bhang lassi shop, the government hash store, her meeting with cannabis guru Ganesh Baba, or a trek to a cave in Kashmir to view Lord Shiva's miraculous ice lingham, Stablein is an intrepid adventurer and humorous chronicler. Pamphlet.