Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture

Rating:
Summary: ok
Review: Emily Jenkins simply did what we should all do before we open our mouths.
She has an extremely accessible writing style and a sense of humor that is rarely paralleled in non-fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Title Misleading
Review: I was given this book as a gift, and so I read the whole thing. From beginning to end I found no "tongue", no "soul", nothing to do with the real experience it claims to represent. I felt as if I were reading a college thesis, correctly and obediently written, but empty. No imagination or what they call "writer's vision". It was like something you'd find in a dentist's office, along with the Reader's Digests, etc. Why was this published as a book? Maybe the author will write a better book when she's older?

Rating:
Summary: An inspired taste of things I'd rather not eat
Review: In spirited, refreshing prose, this book allowed me to venture into and vicariously experience much of the current bodily culture scene. In places, Jenkins' astute sensitivity is touching and disturbing. I closed the last page bigger in awareness than when I opened the first.

Rating:
Summary: Been there done that
Review: The strength of this book is its straightforward, conversational style; Jenkins demonstrates that even the simplest bodily rituals and practices (wearing makeup; using public locker rooms; sleeping) are tied into body fetishisms that mainstream culture casts as deviant (or at least daring, now that tattoos have hit the suburban mall).

Jenkins does not use abstract theoretical jargon (though as a PhD student at Columbia, she surely could); nevertheless her readings of popular culture (and her own place in it) are clearly influenced by a wide range of readings in gender theory and cultural studies. _Tongue First_ can therefore introduce the theoretical concepts of drag, performance, spectacle, and fetishism to an audience that would never pick up a book of theory.

Perhaps this makes the book less theoretically rigorous than, say, Judith Butler's _Gender Trouble_. But it sure is a lot more fun to read. To complain about its light tone (as some reviewers have) is to miss the point; _Tongue First_ does not aspire to being a philosophy textbook, but an engaged, humorous, and above all personal look at our cultural notions of the physical through the medium of Jenkins's own body.

Rating:
Summary: listen
Review: We all hold opinions on certain things, judgements and criticisms, without ever experiencing the things themseleves. Emily Jenkins simply did what we should all do before we open our mouths. It's humorous because we all know that we won't ever do those things that she did, but we will still go on talking.
She has an extremely accessible writing style and a sense of humor that is rarely paralleled in non-fiction.