S/He

In this series of poetic vignettes, award-winning poet Minnie Bruce Pratt explores the fluidity, capaciousness, unpredictability, malleability, and shifting everyday terrains of sex and gender. As memoir, S/HE challenges oppressive frames of respectability and womanhood, tracing Pratt’ s circuitous path through sex, gender, and sexuality. S/HE also narrates one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century, providing an intimate portrayal of how Pratt and Leslie Feinberg met, fell in love, and built a life together. Examining the porous boundaries between masculinity and femininity and noting that liberation requires one to question and cross these binaries, Pratt theorizes sex and gender as not only grids for legibility and surveillance but also as spaces for freedom and pleasure. By drawing on the splendid ordinariness of everyday life and quotidian encounters, Pratt gives “ theory flesh and breath.” S/HE imagines new queer, feminist engagements in bodies, in politics, and in the messy contradictions of sex and gender.