TOP SHELF: So I hate the title of my novel (New Wineskins). It's thematically appropriate but I realized that even I wouldn't pull it off the shelf to have a look, and I wrote it. Help me out here, people!

If you've read the thing and have suggestions for how I can get to a better title, email me. I've kicked around all kinds of variations on the book's themes and I've got exactly two ideas, neither of which I really like: The Future Tense of Flesh and Heartbreak in Political Theory. If you haven't read the book, do you think either of those titles would interest you if you saw them in a bookstore and knew nothing else about the book?

Thanks in advance....

READ MY BOOK FOR MONEY! The one thing I forgot to post last night, which I'd meant to put up once the NYT piece came out, is that I am seeking transgendered readers for a novel. The working title is New Wineskins; the protagonist is FTM, and since I'm not, I really want to make sure the portrayal is resonant and not cliched or harmful. I'm paying standard editing rates of $2/pp, which works out to about $218. I can afford to pay maybe two more readers, so if you or someone you know might be interested, PLEASE email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com and I will email you more details about the novel, as well as answering any questions you might have.

To get a sense of how I think about trans issues, the best place to start is probably my series of posts on Jay Prosser's Second Skins.

And please pass on the word if you think you know someone who might be down for this!

P IS FOR PUS. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus!

Among other things she did.

THEY RECOGNIZED HIM IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD: Over the weekend I finished the first round of edits on my novel. The working title is New Wineskins. It is 64,618 words long (about 108 pp in 12-pt Times New Roman) and is the achingly sincerist story of a transgendered Yale student who becomes unintentionally pregnant. It is Catholic--mackerels snapping left and right--and desperately undergraduate. There's lots of discussion of feminism also. Despite these facts, I think it's pretty awesome.

I realize that the target audience for this novel may consist of: me. But I hope that's not true! I really, really, really need extra eyes for this, so please PLEASE email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com if you want to read the draft. I promise it sucks less than at least 80% of the bestseller list, no lie. Also I think people who have edited my stuff before will tell you that I take criticism well. I've been astonished at how gentle people think they have to be w/fiction criticism, when journalism is basically about your editor telling you precisely where and how you suck. (And sometimes being wrong, but not mostly.)

Also, if you a) think a friend might be interested in the draft (esp a transgendered friend or a friend who has been pregnant), PLEASE PLEASE TELL THEM--I would really love as many different perspectives on my handling of Other People's Experiences as possible and I am working hard to make sure that I have readers who will be able to tell me when I'm being an ass,

and b) relatedly, if you or your friend are not sure you can look at the novel until you know more about it, EMAIL ME and I will answer any questions. E.g. I totally know that people might need to know where the protagonist ends up in terms of gender and/or religious identity before they can settle in to reading the draft.

And finally, if you ask for the draft, I do NOT expect you to read it or comment. I mean, I really, really hope you do! That's why I'm asking. But if you get bored, or get distracted, or don't have anything to say except :/, or whatever, THAT IS OKAY. Asking me for the draft is NOT a commitment of any kind, to any action.

So yeah. No pressure, just a potentially-awesome novel which needs your help to be made less stupid.

If you feel like circulating this plea to more readers, I will think you are cool and also say a prayer for you. To... hm... let's say St. Francis de Sales, the patron of journalists.

"IT IS THE LAST DREAM OF CHILDREN TO BE FOREVER UNTOUCHED." In other news, I finished the draft of the novel. This epigraph brought to you by the Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Foundation, and also the letter Q.

...As Butler exemplifies, queer theory has written of transitions as discursive but it has not explored the bodiliness of gendered crossings. The concomitant of this elision of embodiment is that the transgendered subject has typically had center stage over the transsexual: whether s/he is transvestite, drag queen, or butch woman, queer theory's approbation has been directed toward the subject who crosses the lines of gender, not those of sex. Epitomizing the bodiliness of gender transition--the matter of sex the cross-dresser has been applauded for putatively defying--the transsexual reveals queer theory's own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of gender performativity.

Second Skins reviews and begins the task of redressing queer theory's elision of the experience of "trans" embodiment by focusing on transsexual narratives. It is imperative to read transsexual accounts now in order to flesh out the transgendered figure that queer theory has made prominent. If, for queer theory, transition is to be explored in terms of its deconstructive effects on the body and identity (transition as a symptom of the constructedness of the sex/gender system and a figure for the impossibility of this system's achievement of identity), I read transsexual narratives to consider how transition may be the very route to identity and bodily integrity. In transsexual accounts transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality

Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral side that is concerned.
--Henri Bergson, "Laughter," quoted in (a footnote to) Caroline Walker Bynum, "In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode"--introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

I already have two epigraphs for the novel-in-progress (working title: New Wineskins), and three seems pretentious... but if I need a spare, this one's pretty awesome. I'm so excited about this book.