S/HE

Overview

In this series of poetic vignettes, award-winning poet Minnie Bruce Pratt explores the fluidity, capaciousness, unpredictability, malleability, and shifting everyday terrains of sex and gender.As memoir, S/HE challenges oppressive frames of respectability and womanhood, tracing Pratt’s circuitous path through sex, gender, and sexuality. S/HE also narrates one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century, providing an intimate portrayal of how Pratt and Leslie Feinberg met, fell in love, and built a life together.Examining the porous boundaries between masculinity and femininity and noting that liberation requires one to question and cross these binaries, Pratt theorizes sex and gender as not only grids for legibility and surveillance but also as spaces for freedom and pleasure. By drawing on the splendid ordinariness of everyday life and quotidian encounters, Pratt gives “theory flesh and breath.” S/HE imagines new queer, feminist engagements in bodies, in politics, and in the messy contradictions of sex and gender.

Author Biography

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) was an internationally-acclaimed anti-racist, anti- imperialist lesbian writer, poet, scholar, and activist from Alabama. She is the author of multiple poetry collections including Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, The Dirt She Ate, Inside the Money Machine and most recently, Magnified (2021) a collection of love poems dedicated to her partner and spouse of over 22 years, trans activist-theorist, Leslie Feinberg. Her website, now maintained by her sons, is https://minniebrucepratt.net.