Allison Hammer | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

K. Allison Hammer is an interdisciplinary scholar and critic of American culture, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Their work brings together a diverse archive of historical and contemporary literature, performance, film, and media. As a professor, they are interested in helping students understand and theorize the complexities of gender and sexuality in transnational contexts and the relationship to race, colonialism, and permanent war.

They received a Ph.D. in English literature with an Advanced Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prior to coming to SIU, they taught at Vanderbilt University in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department where they launched the first courses in transgender studies and critical masculinities studies.

Their first book, Masculinity in Transition, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in October 2023. In this work, they look at “toxic masculinity” through a trans and queer lens to explore its historical root systems and cultural and political expressions. New ways of being masculine have been developed across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, suggesting the fragility of the toxic norms currently shaping culture, politics, and society. They take a critical approach to masculinity as a complex gender formation that is tied to different embodiments, subjectivities, sexualities, identifications, and ideologies. The book promises to transform and transgender the field of masculinities studies, and to have a wide impact on gender studies, trans studies, queer theory, and political theory more broadly. Read more about their book.

Additional articles and book chapters can be found in The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability, Frontiers, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Feminist Formations, and Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Lifted Brow, and EOAGH.