What They’re Reading: Mary Gray

Mary Gray, Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture and Gender Studies at Indiana University, is reading Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) edited by David Murray.

“This edited volume helps us imagine a more complicated paradigm that moves homophobia beyond the interpersonal and irrational to a place of collective and deliberative debate and interlocking systems of oppression.  It unpacks the limits of universalizing the meaning of homophobia and examines the baggage of particular cross-cultural cases where homophobia means something far more than we typically give it credit.  It’s a must-read for anyone who feels that the term homophobia has spent its intellectual purchase and wants to consider how we can move past the idiosyncratic to a systemic analysis of what one of the authors calls an “anthropology of hate.”"

–Mary Gray