Grace Lavery Bücher

A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period. Grace Lavery investigates how gender transition has been experienced and depicted, examining works from George Eliot to Sigmund Freud and marriage manuals by Marie Stopes. She highlights the skepticism in these texts regarding the possibility of changing one’s sex, arguing that this ambivalence has fueled both anti-trans oppression and the civil rights movements of trans individuals. Lavery introduces the concept of “trans pragmatism,” emphasizing how trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to seek pleasure and freedom. This perspective affirms the efficacy and reality of transition. With Eliot and Freud as central figures, Lavery traverses a wide array of modern culture, including poetry, prose, philosophy, and pop music. She suggests that transition not only shifts individuals between genres but also offers a cultural history of genre transition itself. By examining techniques associated with feminine craftiness versus masculine freedom, Lavery posits that the ability to give and receive pleasure is crucial for trans feminist thriving, despite suppression by patriarchal and anti-trans feminist ideologies. She challenges the notion of transition's impossibility, presenting a counterhistory of knowledge shared among women, often overlooked in mainstream narratives.

Green shoots, green leaves, California green vesicles beneath the California green-brown mud. A hormonal transition is a new start, but it is not a new start like a shoot emerges from the mud: it is a fresh start constructed from the green plastics one has to hand.

Exploring the American sitcom's evolution, Grace Lavery examines how the genre's crises and resolutions frame heterosexuality as perpetually unstable. She highlights the significance of queer characters in traditional family sitcoms, revealing the underlying incompleteness of these narratives. Analyzing techniques like the laugh track, Lavery discusses the transition to friend-group and workplace comedies, suggesting they reflect weakened social connections. Through a queer and trans lens, she argues that the perceived stability of family ties in sitcoms is more fragile than commonly understood.

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan held a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, seen as both a rival empire and a source of exquisite beauty. This exploration delves into the lasting impact of this encounter, illustrating how Japan's rise transformed Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and extensive archival research, Grace Lavery presents a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She posits that the late nineteenth-century global popularity of Japanese art mirrored an imagined universal standard of taste, akin to Kant's "subjective universal" condition of aesthetic judgment. The work includes cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English haiku adaptations, and retellings of Madame Butterfly, while also highlighting lesser-known figures like Winnifred Eaton, who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese admirer of Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery discusses the significance of material objects, such as W. B. Yeats's katana sword and Oscar Wilde's "Japanese vellum" luxury editions. This examination offers vital insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a conduit for both intimacy and violence, along with the enduring influence of Japanese forms on contemporary writers and artists like Quentin Tarantino.