There is an elementary school exercise in which you identify your location in increments moving outward. The point of making this list, which sounds something like “I'm in my head, my chair, the classroom, the school building, the town, the state, etc,” is to prove that our knowledge is always limited by “my head” as its starting point, and “the universe” as its end. Rona Yefman's extensive documentation of aging transvestite Martha Bourke begets this sort of realization: no matter how intimate we become with each other, we'll never fully understand what's outside the self.
