Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1328489 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-01
• Original language: English, German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 108 pages

From Booklist
Persons whose gender self-perception differs from their anatomies have probably been around "forever," but burgeoning population, communications, individualism, and human rights during the past half-century have made them more visible, vocal, and various. Most of Allen's photographic subjects haven't undergone genital reconstruction, even when they have taken other steps such as altering facial hair and breast size. Most say they've gone as far as they want with physical changes. They now want to be respected as the persons they have become. Allen, who has photographed transgender persons for 20 years, shows them as they wish to be seen, which for some gender-reassigned persons includes nakedness (and, for one, images from penile-constructive surgery) as well as wearing everyday and special-occasion attire. Informative and more endearing than Allen or her subjects perhaps intended, the pictures are photojournalistic, not studio work, portraying the subjects at work and play, at home and in public. If the concluding biographical statements report plenty of pathos and worse, Allen's pictures demonstrate that such suffering lies in her subjects' pasts. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The Ecological Diversity of Gender
Ever since the 1970's there has been a growing literature on the topic of gender, some of it of very high quality, some of it negligible. But Mariette Pathy Allen's new book, "The Gender Frontier"(Kehrer, 2004) stands out from all of the books that have preceded it in its immediate humanity, its depth of insight, its extraordinary drama, its excitement at the birth of a new human community, its emotional pathos and its uninhibited celebration of the lives of some of the most courageous people alive today, those who identify themselves as transgendered.

The story that Mariette tells us of the transgendered person who had her throat slit while a group of New York cab drivers stood by and laughed is not fiction. Nor is the story of Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual whose transition surgeon told him that a hysterectomy was unnecessary for his change to a man. When Robert contracted ovarian cancer, he was faced with the life-shattering irony that all that was left of his previous existence as a woman was killing him as a man. In a brazen mockery of the Hippocratic Oath, 20 doctors and three hospitals refused to treat him. When he finally found a doctor willing to treat him the cancer had progressed too far to be arrested. The doctors, it seems, were afraid that having "that kind of person" in their waiting rooms would scare away business.

Mariette is both a photographer whose work ranks as genuine, lasting art and a writer whose personal and intimate style, free of all the gender jargon, describes for us the daily lives of transgendered people with their families, their children, their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their aspirations and their vocations in life. Through her words and through the lens of her camera we see them as real people dealing with the exigencies of life just like the rest of us and not as the sordid, commercialized, pornographic freaks we all too often meet on the Internet and in the pages of XXXX magazines.

For this reason Mariette Pathy Allen will take her rightful place in the history of art, and of human liberation, as the original pioneer who brought the human universe of transgendered people to light and as an activist artist whose unflinching dedication to the truth has brought relief, happiness, dignity, self-esteem and psychological self-acceptance to thousands of transgendered persons.

Among professional photographers Mariette is the only one I know of who has dared to document and defend and demonstrate the inherent human beauty of a group of people that to date has been shamefully shunned and hysterically persecuted by society at large. She is not only a superb photographer and an engaging writer, she is also a woman who has been brave enough to go in harm's way for the sake of understanding, tolerance, acceptance and a more truly diverse and human society.

"The Gender Frontier" is a truly beautiful, inspirational book in every sense of those words. It is a "keeper" that everyone should have in their library. Please go buy it. Then feel yourself challenged and transformed as you proceed from one page to the next, from one story to the next. And when you arrive at the end you will have come to realize that we human beings are far more fascinating and complex and mysterious and wonderful then we thought we were when we unthinkingly imprisoned our own minds in the claustrophobic confines of the traditional binary concept of gender.

Art & Activism
Without Mariette Pathy Allen's art and activism, the transgender movement would not be the vital force that it is today. It's that simple. If you care enough about the provocative subject of gender to have found your way to this page, this book belongs in your library. Enjoy!

Veronica Vera
Miss Vera's Academy

moving photography and personal histories
this book avoids being sensationalistic and instead shows a very real portrait of what different transgendered lives and experiences look like. the histories of the subjects are particularly moving and personal. i'd recomend this book for anyone interested in gender studies or portrait photography. if, however, you're looking for a sesational and exploitative book of "trannies" than you might want to pass this one up.