ABSTRACT
The verdant hills of Casablanca look down on homes and shops jammed chockablock against narrow, twisted streets filled with the odors of spices and dung. Casablanca is a very old city, passed over by Lawrence Durrell perhaps only by a geographical accident as the winepress of love. Though Empire represented a specific moment in feminist analysis and prefigured the appropriation of liberal political language by a radical right, in 1991, on the twelfth anniversary of its publication, it is still the definitive statement on transsexualism by a genetic female academic. The mysterium tremendum of deep identity hovers about a physical locus; the entire complex of male engenderment, the mysterious power of the Man-God, inhabits the “germ glands” in the way that the soul was thought to inhabit the pineal. Some of the early nonacademic gender dysphoria clinics performed surgery on demand, which is to say regardless of any judgment on the part of the clinic staff.
