Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism. Viviane Namaste. Toronto: Women's Press, 2005; xii + 136 pages; ISBN 0-889691-452-0; $24.95 (paper).

www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 31.2, 2007

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Viviane Namaste makes a significant contribution to changing how feminist activists, scholars, teachers, and students think and talk about transsexual lives and politics in Canada. Arguing that we must shift our analyses away from identity and towards questions about how imperialism and institutional frameworks structure and erase transsexual experiences, Namaste places the everyday at the centre of this inquiry. Her work in this volume is deliberately challenging and provocative, not simply because it goes against the grain of a great deal of feminist thinking about transsexuality that privileges identity, but because her insistence on considering national and linguistic imperialism in relation to feminism forces us to re-vision Canadian feminist history to evaluate the foundational and shaping role racism, nationalism, and imperialism plays/played in this history and organizing.
The variety of texts in this volume is eclectic and speaks to Namaste's extensive efforts to bridge the (sometimes real, sometimes imaginary) gap between activism and academia. This book contains interviews with leftist and trans academics, activists, and artists, a letter to nominate PASAN (Prisoners' HIV/AIDS Support Action Network) for the TFC Trans Planet Outstanding Organization Award, a chapter dedicated to women's studies teaching, the keynote address for the 2001 Sexin' Change conference in Toronto, and a chapter that uses two case studies about how imperialism is implicitly supported in contemporary struggles for the legal rights of transsexual people. All of these pieces address the tremendous foundational impact of transsexual prostitutes, prisoners, and drug addicts on transsexual politics and activism. Namaste seeks to undo the gentrification of transsexual activism and history and the institutional erasure of such key actors. These pieces highlight issues such as the restrictive imperative for transsexuals to understand their lives through an LGBQ framework, the refusal of the media (even the serious, "legitimate" media) to take transsexual stories on their own terms and demand that transsexuality be told only on an autobiographical basis, and how struggles for health insurance benefits tied to employment and human rights legislation actually work to further entrench anglo imperialism and deny the foundation of contemporary transsexual politics.

Namaste's chapter, written in collaboration with Georgia Sitara, on teaching the Kimberly Nixon case is especially demonstrative of how shifting the focus from identity to institutions and imperialism when talking about transsexuality moves us in more politically productive directions than the abstract and rather unanswerable question, "Who is/is not a 'woman'?" Namaste suggests that if we move beyond this, there are many possibilities for a rich analysis of this case, including the opportunity to problematize "women's experience" as a universal product of being sexed female at birth; thinking through the troublesome and disturbing feminist recourse to analogies between race and gender; and making links between feminist appeals to the law and the state and the general support of imperialism and nationalism in feminist histories.
Considering the Nixon case (and, by extension, anything we discuss about transsexuality) as not solely a question of identity pushes us out of comfortable abstraction and into the messy dissonances of transsexual and feminist theory and politics.
Rachel Hurst York University