Tag Archives: seal press

Negotiating Love: An Interview with Samhita Mukhopadhyay

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Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a writer, activist and executive editor of feminist website Feministing.com.  Her first book Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life discusses contemporary dating mores and gender roles, and the challenge of finding fulfilling relationships in a patriarchal world.
Emily Manuel: Let’s start out by giving the general gist of the book, what were you trying to achieve?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I felt a tremendous frustration with what I felt were the dominant narratives about romance in the mainstream media.  I really saw the book as an intervention.  Not really rewriting the fairytale, or this is how you live happily ever after, not necessarily a follow these guides into the relationship of your dreams, but to really critically analyse the dominant mess that we have internalised about romance and to really serve as an intervention into what I felt was making young people unhappy. Continue reading →

Transgender History, Present and Future

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Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Seal Press, 2008.

Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, eds. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Seal Press, 2010.

The feminist press Seal has carved out a distinctive niche for itself in its line of transgender authored books, still often something of a rarity in today’s publishing world.  Two recent books from Seal demonstrate the vitality of transsexual, transgender and genderqueer writings in the present day, as well as some of the ongoing political tensions between various groups in the transgender umbrella

Susan Stryker’s Transgender History is, as the name suggests, is a history of transgender people and politics of the last hundred 150 years, primarily in the United States.  Pegged as an introductory guide, this entry in Seal’s Seal Studies series is a readable and accessible primer on trans identities and politics.  Historian Stryker is an expert in the field of transgender studies, having edited and published numerous works, most notably The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006).  Though it covers some of the same  ground as Joanne Meyorowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality In The United States, Transgender History carves out a distinct niche in its focus on the many forms of activism that trans people have engaged in over the last century.

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