Telling Body Transgendering Stories

This chapter re-frames our earlier work on cross-dressing and sex- changing in terms of the ‘narrative turn’ (Maines 1993; Maines and Ulmer 1993) in contemporary social science and cultural theory. Elsewhere, we have analyzed two decades of fieldwork, life history work, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers in terms of a qualitative sociology and social psychology principally indebted to symbolic interactionism, historical analysis and grounded theory (for example, Ekins 1983; 1993; 1997; King 1981; 1993; Ekins and King 1996a; 1998). Here, we draw upon Plummer’s work on ‘sexual stories’ (Plummer 1995; 1996) in order to consider contemporary transgender diversity in terms of a number of conceptually distinct ‘narratives of transgendering’ that we have discerned in our research into contemporary cross-dressing and sex-changing in Western Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.