S/he

In this series of poetic vignettes, Minnie Bruce Pratt explores the fluidity, capaciousness, unpredictability, malleability, and shifting everyday terrains of sex and gender. Written with the eye and style of a poet, S/HE braids memoir with Gloria AnzaldÚa's autohistoria-teorÍa narrating a vibrant period in the lives of Pratt and her lover and spouse Leslie Feinberg. S/HE challenges oppressive frames of respectability and womanhood and traces Pratt's circuitous path navigating sex, gender, and sexuality while coming into her own lesbian identity.



Pratt examines the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, noting that they are much more porous than imagined. In fact, liberation requires questioning, crossing, and challenging these binary borders. She theorizes sex and gender as not only grids of legibility and surveillance but as spaces of freedom and dynamism. For Pratt, theory is something we live and breathe and is found in the "eccentric and wandering ways of our daily life." By drawing on the splendid ordinariness of everyday life and quotidian encounters, Pratt gives "theory flesh and breath." She invites reflections about how humans might be-in our bodies, in our politics, and in our messy contradictions of sex and gender.