可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Science | Book | HQ77.95 .U6 B58 2002 | 1 | Stacks | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, her first full-length work of nonfiction. In Normal, the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award finalist explores sex and gender through portraits of people who are widely considered not normal. "A great many people, sick of news from the margins, worn out by the sand shifting beneath their assumptions, like to imagine Nature as a sweet, simple voice: tulips in spring, Vermont's leaves falling in autumn," Bloom writes. "Nature is more like Aretha Franklin: vast, magnificent, capricious, occasionally hilarious, and infinitely varied." Bloom takes us on a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of "people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic"--female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transgender transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, "Melanie," who devote themselves to the cause of "ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension." And we meet Hale Hawbecker, "a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy" with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Bloom shows the essential humanity in this infinite variety, allowing us to appreciate these people as they really are--both like and unlike everyone else--and inviting us "to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share." Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, about what it means to be male or female, Bloom reveals new facets to ideas about happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illumines the very concept of "normal."
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Taking in an amazing range and diversity of the human experience of gender and sexuality, novelist Bloom (Love Invents Us) devotes an essay each to three phenomena: female to male transsexualism, heterosexual cross-dressing and the intersexed, or those with ambiguous genitalia or confusing chromosomal balance. But she is most interested in examining "why the rest of us struggle" with gender and sexual experiences we do not share. Bloom interviews people from each of the above groups (as well as doctors, social scientists and gender activists) and brings together, in graceful, readable prose, a plethora of facts, ideas, arguments and personal responses to help us reconsider received ideas about gender. While some of her information is surprising (babies born with "confusing" gentials are more common than babies born with cystic fibrosis), she never uses the lives of her subjects to titillate. Bloom is happy to confess her own, and others', confusions and lack of information, pointing out that there is no reliable information on the number of heterosexual cross-dressers, for instance. And she allows her subjects like the female-to-male-transsexual who has not undergone phalloplasty and claims, "I can live this way, as a man with a vagina" their complicated lives. Fascinating without being prurient, detailed without being overly scientific, the book opens new ways of viewing not only gender but our own inability to accept difference. (Oct.) Forecast: Bloom's original piece in the New Yorker generated a lot of attention, and readers of her fiction will tune in to see what she's up to. If media bandwidth is available, this accessible book could be high-profile enough to initiate copycat articles and think-piece reviews and thus sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Psychoanalyst and story-writer Bloom (A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, 2000, etc.) aims to expand our notion of what is normal by showing up-close the lives of people widely considered to be abnormal: female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, and the intersexed. Individuals who have altered female bodies to match their male self-concept, plastic surgeons who perform female-to-male sex change surgery, and psychiatric researchers into transsexual transition all share their thoughts with the author, and the surgeons also provide graphic images of their handiwork. Bloom takes the reader to a conference of transsexuals and cross-dressers at a southern motel, on a Carnival cruise hosting heterosexual cross-dressers and their wives, and to a Missouri convention of cross-dressers featuring a beauty pageant. She describes these men with a fetish for women's clothes as "Presbyterian accountants from Cedar Rapids and Lutheran ministers from Omaha . . . decent, kind, intelligent, and willing to talk openly." (Their wives seem resigned yet supportive.) Perhaps the saddest chapter of Bloom's report on gender variability is the one on hermaphrodites, as intersexed individuals are often called. The assumption that a baby born with a minuscule, malformed penis or a greatly enlarged clitoris would be better off "normalized" has led physicians to perform reconstructive surgery on newborns, an approach that is now challenged by the Intersex Society of America, which urges doctors to proceed with caution and provides counsel and support to parents. The angry voice of someone subjected to childhood surgery, declared first a girl, then a boy, then a girl, makes for painful reading. Yet the intersexed are the least convincing cases in Bloom's contention that nature is infinite in its variety and has not made mistakes with these people; she makes her strongest argument with the examples of heterosexual cross-dressers. A moving examination of the variety of gender and erotic preferences, presented with varying degrees of persuasiveness as examples of nature's vast spectrum of possibilities.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Bloom's understanding of gender changed radically after her remarkable odyssey into the hidden worlds of female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, and hermaphrodites, and so will her readers'. She is uniquely qualified to tell the perplexing and poignant stories of gender-benders by virtue of her work as a clinical social worker and empathic fiction writer (the exceptional A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You [2000] reflects the invaluable revelations sparked by this inquiry), not to mention her curiosity and piquant sense of humor. Lucid, frank, and compassionate, Bloom succinctly recounts her illuminating conversations with straight men who feel compelled to dress as women and their amazingly supportive wives; individuals who were born with a woman's body and a man's soul who underwent excruciating and expensive surgery (which Bloom explains in detail) in order to live as their true selves; people born with "ambiguous genitals"; surgeons who perform the complicated, sometimes controversial operations that "correct" these confusing states; and the activists and entrepreneurs who support them. Beautifully done, Bloom's fascinating and enlightening disquisition greatly extends our perception of humanness. --Donna Seaman
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Exploring territory that lies beyond the dichotomies of female and male, gay and straight, Bloom, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for her story collection, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, introduces members of three very different groups who challenge common definitions of gender and sexuality. For her first nonfiction book, she interviewed women who have surgery in order to conform physically with the male gender they have always seen themselves as having; heterosexual men who satisfy a sexual fetish (they prefer to call it a hobby) by dressing in women's clothing; and the intersexed, whose prime political objective is to do away with the unquestioned cosmetic surgery on children born with ambiguous genitalia. A practicing psychotherapist, fiction writer, feminist, and lesbian, Bloom dares the reader to be willingly confounded by her always engaging, frequently humorous interviewees while also airing her own reactions, particularly her outrage at the brutal surgeries whose benefits have yet to be proven performed on unwitting infants. As an accessible, nonsensationalistic introduction to a fascinating and controversial subject, this volume is recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/02.] Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.