The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is pleased to announce the 2013 John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology has been awarded to Samantha Allen of Emory University.

Samantha Allen

Samantha is a Ph.D. student and the George W. Woodruff Fellow in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University.

Samantha Allen's dissertation project, “Thinking Fetishism: An Affective Reading of 'Sexual Paraphilias,'” aims both to redress the under-theorization of sexual fetishism in the critical humanities and to position practices of sexual fetishism as complex affective experiences that are at the center of unique forms of erotic cultural production.

Samantha's dissertation brackets the traditional Freudian narrative of fetishism as a disavowal of castration in order to theorize the affective dimensions of fetishistic practices and the erotic cultural products that surround these practices. She uses Silvan Tomkins' theory of primary affects to ask: How do fetishes feel? How do fetishists understand, describe, discuss and imagine their own practices?

At The Kinsey Institute, Samantha will complement her contemporary qualitative and computer-mediated research on practices of sexual fetishism with invaluable historical material from the Institute's Collections. She will spend her time researching a wide range of media (books, photos, videos, graphic art, tabloids, etc.) on several different sexual fetishes (shoe, foot, nylon, pantyhose, breast, spanking, hair, etc.) dating from across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Samantha will also be producing a detailed annotated bibliography and an accompanying review essay that will provide an overview of the material on sexual fetishism in the Kinsey Institute Collections. She hopes that this bibliographic project will facilitate the work of future scholars and that it can help establish historical precedents for modes of erotic cultural production that may, at first blush, seem to be unique to contemporary, computer-mediated Internet fetish communities.

Project Update

Samantha Allen completed her project in the fall, 2013. Her contributions will enable future researchers to locate fetish-related materials available through The Kinsey Institute library.

Annotated bibliography (pdf)
Review essay on Fetish materials in the Kinsey library. (pdf)

Honorable Mention: Joshua Trey Barnett

The Honorable Mention for 2013 goes to Joshua Trey Barnett, Masters Candidate from the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Mr. Barnett’s project is entitled, "Bodies in Motion: Visualizing the Transsexual Body-In Transition in Contemporary U.S. Photography." His research aims to better understand how a process of corporeal transition is represented and performed beyond the body itself.

For more information about the John Money Scholarship for Students of Sexology, please visit our webpage here.