Book Review: Men Doing Feminism edited by Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. Paperback. ISBN 0-415-91626-7. The relation between feminism and men is often presumed to be antagonistic. Men are expected to resist feminism; feminists are assumed to hate men. However, that oppossitionality is thrown into question by the increasing numbers of men involved in feminist theory and practice. This collection of essays, most of them published here for the first time, presents both enthusiastic and cautionary views of men doing feminism. The eighteen contributors--women, men, blacks, whites, gays, straights, transsexuals--move the conversation about male feminism beyond simplistic notions of oppossitionality between feminism and male identity. Many of the authors use personal narrative to show ways men's lives can shape approaches to doing feminism, and to convey the opportunities and challenges involved in integrating feminism into men's lives. Of particular interest to ftms are the two essays by C. Jacob Hale and Henry Rubin, which take different approaches to the relationships between ftms and feminist theory/practice. Both articles incorporate personal narrative that clarifies some of the differences between the two authors' lived experiences, thereby enabling this anthology to include ftm voices without tokenization or misrepresentation of ftms as if we all shared one life story, spoke with one voice, and fit one mold. Hale, an associate professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge, traces some of the ways in which transsexuals comprise a colonized people. His essay, "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections of Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency" (pgs. 99-129), uses this discussion of colonization as a contextual background in which to situate his remarks about some of the specific problems ftms face when trying to do feminism and his development of the epistemological, ontological and political contours of one possible feminist subject position for genderqueer ftms who live in the border zones of multiple identity categories. Rubin, a lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University, explores erasures he has met in how some feminists think about him as a transsexual man, erasures of himself either as a man or as a feminist. His article, "Reading Like a (Transsexual) Man" (pgs. 305-324), suggests that a tension between his desire to be (and be recognized as) a "real man" and his desire for feminist social justice is a productive tension. He argues that this tension has enabled him to become a better feminist after transition and that, more generally, the tension between manhood and feminism is a fertile ground for engendering perverse identities and knowledges that can be used for feminist purposes.
	Contributors: Michael Awkward, Susan Bordo, Harry Brod, Tom Digby, Judith K. Gardiner, C. Jacob Hale, Sandra Harding, Patrick Hopkins, Joy James, David Kahane, Michael Kimmel, Gary Lemons, Larry May, Brian Pronger, Henry Rubin, Richard Schmitt, James P. Sterba, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, Thomas E. Wartenberg.
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