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SOCIAL SCIENCES

Social sciences examine human behavior, social structures, and interactions in various settings. Fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics study social relationships, cultural norms, and institutions. By using different research methods, social scientists seek to understand community dynamics, the effects of policies, and factors driving social change. This field is important for tackling current issues, guiding public discussions, and developing strategies for social progress and innovation.

Posts tagged Pornography
Like a Dog

By Samblanet, Lauren

Taking its cues from the New Narrative writing movement, like a dog considers how sexual identity is morphed, hidden, and denied by cultural forces like film, pornography, rape culture, and sexual semiotics. The speaker of like a dog writes about her sexuality, sexual trauma, and relationships in the epistolary form to explore how the personal becomes collective and how overt sexuality is necessary for questioning dominant ideologies. The intimacy (or perhaps voyeurism) that is opened through the epistolary form is balanced with commentary on the films of Lars von Trier, primarily Nymphomaniac, as a way to move away from the speaker’s experiences and into the larger social forces that seek to define us. Amidst these letters are images from a handwritten journal where blood, hair, vaginal fluids, and other bodily residues are used to direct the shape and content of the writing surrounding them. The tactility of the journal delivers the reader to the body, not as an intellectualized object, but as the physical, messy, oozing force that it is. Neither fiction nor nonfiction, and inhabiting a realm between gossip and scholarly film analysis, like a dog exists in a liminal zone that offers the speaker a site to rip away the layers of cultural conditioning surrounding sexuality and relationships, and to peek at what lies beneath. This interrogation of identity may not lead to answers but the speaker of like a dog is able to finally hear her own voice and to begin the work of rebuilding an identity that blooms from within.

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2024. 149p.