Memoirs of a Mans Maiden Years
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491_9780812220612
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Memoirs of a Mans Maiden YearsN. O. Body. Translated by Deborah Simon. Preface by Sander L. Gilman. Afterword by Hermann SimonThis is a very interesting and beautifully written memoir by somebody who would have been called a hermaphrodite in the nineteenth century. The work gives a fascinating picture of the childhood experiences of the anonymous author and is full of sensitive and often moving observations on the plights of sexual ambiguity in childhood. The style, apparently so simple and relatively dispassionate, is extremely effective in pulling the reader into the story.--Chandak SengooptaI was born a boy, raised as a girl. . . . One may raise a healthy boy in as womanish a manner as one wishes, and a female creature in as mannish; never will this cause their senses to remain forever reversed.So writes the pseudonymous N. O. Body, born in 1884 with ambiguous genitalia and assigned a female identity in early infancy. Brought up as a girl, she nevertheless asserted stereotypical male behavior from early on. In the end, it was a passionate love affair with a married woman that brought matters to a head. Desperately confused, suicidally depressed, and in consultation with Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the most eminent and controversial sexologists of the day, she decided to become he.Originally published in 1907 and now available for the first time in English, Memoirs of a Mans Maiden Years describes a childhood and youth in Kaiser Wilhelms Germany that is shaped by bourgeois attitudes and stifled by convention. It is, at the same time, a book startlingly charged with sexuality. Yet, however frank the memoirist may be about matters physical or emotional, Hermann Simon reveals in his afterword the full extent of the lengths to which N. O. Body went to hide not just his true name but a second secret, his Jewish identity. And here, Sander L. Gilman suggests in his brilliant preface, may lie the crucial hint to solving the real riddle of the ambiguous
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