Reviews
Jay Sennett’s new anthology, Self-Organizing Men, represents an ambitious effort to grapple with issues of social privilege, cultural assumptions, and public presentation, versus personal subjectivity among trans-masculine individuals and transgender communities.
Leslie and Shahn Freeman-Dykesen, Out in the Mountains
Self-Organizing Men look(s) beyond biology to find how we define ourselves, our bodies, spirit, and gender.
Patrick Lincoln, Masculinities in Media
If you care about gender, read this book. Be ready to have your preconceived notions, even if you developed them in women’s or gender studies classrooms, challenged. And encourage Jay to publish more like this.
Dr. Nels P. Highberg, A Delicate Boy
I thought it was a nice mix of academic work, personal essays, what I think is a poem, artwork, a dialogue, and probably other bits I have forgotten. Being self centric, I really was interested in parts that I had personally experienced. By which I mean once I saw Scott Turner Scofield do a performance(and once he taught our gay history class) and so I thought smuggly that Emory let him by with only a few warnings around the area about how the show might contain nudity, and also, I saw a picture of Nick’s cute baby on the interweb, so followed his story about transmotherhood with interest.But don’t get me wrong. The voices I hadn’t heard before interested me too. I’m reading an essay called Trans Incoherence now and think it should be photocopied and handed out in women’s studies classrooms. I mean, the teacher should buy a copy of course! Then again, maybe the students should all buy their own copies? Yea, that’s the ticket.
Shannon @ Egotistical Whining
Wow. Drinking my first cuppa this a.m., as part of my toying around with the project of being a gay man (Janet Halley reference) and “taking a break from feminism” for awhile, I decided to read the introduction to Self-Organizing Men, an anthology of essays, images, and poetry from transmen edited by Jay Sennett. What an inspiring introduction!
Bitch at Bitch Lab
Just got my copy of _self-organizing men_ edited by Jay Sennett today, and I am hyper with the drug of smart good ideas & philosophizing!Highlights:
- Eli Clare’s poem, which I read out loud twice at brunch.
- About Radicalia Feminista. Phallacies and Queeries: a Phaggot’s Contemplations by Tim’m T West which I want to just quote the whole thing to you. So smart and awesome! also, love the inclusiveness of the book that included a piece with the sentence: “We are butch dykes with biological penises that we do not exalt…” (1) (2)
- The dialogue between Jordy Jones & Doran George: damn! do I now have an intellectual crush on them both!
(1) I must admit, I wasn’t expecting the anthology to include somebody with a bio-cock. and I love, love, love that it did! It makes the space safer for me to be there– in the same way that when I had all-girl body-painting parties in the 90s I always included at least one boy… defining a space more broadly makes it safer for mixed-race genderfuckers like myself…
(2) Reading this quote out loud in a coffee shop got me big smiles from the interracial boy-girl couple at the next table over. 
