Gender/Fucking, described by author Florence Ashley as academic smut, combines erotica, theory, poetry, and personal narrative to critique and offer an alternative method to contemporary approaches within scholarly work on gender and sexuality. Ashley draws on her personal experience (though she explains that some of the narratives are hyperbolic or fabulations) of being trans, both positive and negative. She argues that academic conversations about sex should consider bodily epistemologies and move away from purely theoretical abstraction. For Ashley, sex may not be the key to liberation, but it functions as an important element of everyday life, and thus requires that scholars engage it in all its complexity, contradictions, and messiness.
Articles by Collin Hawley
Collin Hawley holds a Bachelor of Arts in photography and film studies as well as a Master of Arts in humanities with a concentration in cultural studies from Milligan University in Johnson City, Tenn. His research draws from his practical experience as an analog photographer and examines how the interfaces of visual technologies structure participation with practices of sexuality and the articulation of gendered subject formations. Currently, he is a doctoral student in George Mason’s Cultural Studies Program.
Review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam by Thy Phu (Duke University Press)
Thy Phu’s Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam draws on archives of the Vietnam War that center Vietnamese perspectives to complicate the historical and contemporary visual representation of Vietnamese identities that have been filtered through the Western narrative of the Vietnam War. Her book emphasizes the significance of typically denigrated visual materials including propaganda and vernacular photographs. She focuses on the complex deployment and reception of photographic objects as politicized symbols, sources of memorialization, and identity formation.