Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies

The articulation of a generic social process of 'body femaling' presented i n Ekins (1993) and elaborated in Ekins (1997) is further developed in this article to provide a conceptual framework for a sociology of transgendered bodies. Transgendering refers both to the idea of moving across (transferri ng) from one pre-existing gender category to another (either temporarily or permanently), and to the idea of transcending or living 'beyond gender' al together. Following Plummer's (1995) work on sexual stories, we distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering body stories which we consider in terms of four major modes or styles of body transgendering: those we identi fy as 'migrating', 'oscillating', 'erasing' and 'transcending'. We give ill ustrative examples of each mode with reference to the binary male/female di vide, the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender, and the interre lations between the four main subprocesses of transgendering, which we iden tify as 'substituting', 'concealing', 'implying' and 'redefining'.