Arlene Stein

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning author, sociologist, and Rutgers professor ARLENE STEIN for a discussion of her latest book, Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. RUBEN HOPWOOD, the Coordinator of the Transgender Health Program at Fenway Health.

About Unbound

Award-winning sociologist Arlene Stein takes us into the lives of four strangers who find themselves together in a sun-drenched surgeon’s office, having traveled to Florida from across the United States in order to masculinize their chests. Ben, Lucas, Parker, and Nadia wish to feel more comfortable in their bodies; three of them are also taking testosterone so that others recognize them as male. Following them over the course of a year, Stein shows how members of this young transgender generation, along with other gender dissidents, are refashioning their identities and challenging others’ conceptions of who they are. During a time of conservative resurgence, they do so despite great personal costs. 

Transgender men comprise a large, growing proportion of the trans population, yet they remain largely invisible. In this powerful, timely, and eye-opening account, Stein draws from dozens of interviews with transgender people and their friends and families, as well as with activists and medical and psychological experts. Unbound documents the varied ways younger trans men see themselves and how they are changing our understanding of what it means to be male and female in America.

Praise

“If you’ve been trying to make sense of how gender today seems to have slipped the chains that bind it to our bodies in familiar ways, Unbound is a book for you. It’s a sympathetic account by non-transgender sociologist Arlene Stein, aimed at a primarily non-transgender audience, of four people assigned female at birth who surgically masculinize their chests. Stein helps her readers understand that they, too, no longer need be bound by conventional expectations of the meaning of our flesh.” —Susan Stryker, founding co-editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

“In this gripping, illuminating and clear-eyed portrait of what it means to be transmasculine in today’s America, Arlene Stein does justice to an oft-misrepresented topic. A vivid and fiercely empathetic narrative that juxtaposes nuanced portraits of these young people with a clearly articulated understanding of what it means to navigate a culture that treats gender minorities with contempt, ignorance, and violence. Unbound is a revelatory read that fills an important role in gender studies.” —Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home

“Arlene Stein's group portrait of four transgender individuals preparing for surgery expands our understanding of both the internal experience of gender identity and its fluidity and construction. Deeper than a broad survey, broader than a memoir, Unbound is an enriching sociological account that enables readers to enter a space typically seen only from afar.” —Michael Kimmel, author of Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era