Volume 1
Commentaries
Dr. Jem Tosh
(2021)
I came out as genderfluid on National Coming Out Day in 2018, and more recently I have started to write about my gender in my published work (e.g. Tosh, 2020). For the most part, the response I have received has been positive and supportive, but over two years later I still find that the most common response to me 'outing' myself as genderfluid is one of confusion. I can see the anxiety on loving faces as they worry about 'getting it wrong' while trying their best to be supportive, I hear colleagues and acquaintances apologise in advance of making mistakes because they are so sure that they will misgender or offend me in some way, I watch as allies and strangers grapple with how to show their support for something that they do not fully understand. So, below I answer some common questions about what genderfluidity is and how you can support the genderfluid people in your life...
Book Reviews
Krista Carson (2017)
Jessica Valenti is a columnist at The Guardian US, founder of feministing.com, and author of several books about women's issues (e.g. Friedman & Valenti, 2008; Valenti, 2010, 2014). In her recent book, Sex Object: A Memoir (Valenti, 2016), which is a New York Times bestseller, she recounts her experiences growing up in Queens, N.Y. She reflects on her relationships, motherhood, and most prominently, her weariness of the everyday sexism she has endured. Valenti describes how living in a sexist and misogynistic culture has shaped her life. The book offers a compelling account of the author's own experiences with issues such as sexual double standards, sexual objectification, and sexualized violence in the US. Sex Object begins with Valenti asking, "Who would I be if I lived in a world that didin't hate women?" (p. 2). She discusses what object status means to her, and how objectification has been a normative and inevitable part of her lived experience, pondering the cumulative effects of this.
Dan Oudshoorn
(2020)
Discussing a therapeutic rape culture with Jem Tosh
Near the opening of The Body and Consent in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Medicine (2020), Jem Tosh very openly explains where she is situated in relation to the subject matter she will go on to discuss. Rather than seeking to advance her academic brand status by positioning herself amongst the intelligentsia (by highlighting her ability to engage in rigourous “objective” research, pursue “the facts” no matter where they lead, publish with all the right imprints, teach at all the right institutions, and so on and so forth), Tosh proudly stands in the tradition of the “organic intellectual” (as per Gramsci) or the “critic as partisan” (as per Eagleton). Tosh is personally invested in this subject matter - she has been subjected to this way of mattering (as per Foucault with Karen Barad’s discussion of meaning and matter in Meeting the Universe Halfway) - but along with those who are exploring ableism, madness, race, gender, sexuality, and class from liminal spaces (which are embraced rather than seen as environments to overcome or transcend)...
Creative Works
Dee Lister
(2018)
Objects poke scratch hurt
deep inside of me.
Body quartered
pain echoes in the third chamber of this house...
Ruthie Adamson
(2018)
In the film Sunset BOULEVARD the leading lady finds it HARD to face the
TRUTH which is her YOUTH is a thing of the PAST.
Her DELUSION CONFUSION means CONSEQUENTLY SHE fails to SEE her
POPULARITY as a MOVIE must-SEE didn't LAST...
Aisling Keavey
(2018)
Accidental journeys traces both the historical and contemporary journey the Irish diaspora took from Ireland to England by photographing a journey from East Croyden to Gatwick Airport using black and white analogue film, then adding dates of famine ships sailing from Cobh to America in the 1840s and 1850s over the images. By placing the images out of chronological order, post-structuralist narrative is alluded to and also shows that meaning is constructed at the point of engagement with the image by the viewer...