Marty Fink is an Associate Professor in ProCom with a focus on queer and trans studies. Their research and teaching investigates archival media, zines, and novels toward supporting Black Lives Matter, HIV activism, and prison abolition. They work in collaboration with community organizations including Montreal's Prisoner Correspondence Project (external link) on harm reduction, body self-determination, and defunding the police.
Marty Fink is the author of Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care (external link) (Rutgers University Press)
Research Interests
I work in queer/trans studies with a focus on disability justice and HIV/AIDS activism. I am interested in intersectional, anti-oppressive, and antiracist theoretical work. I am trained in English literature and my research methods employ close reading, textual analysis, autotheory, and critical theoretical readings of primary, archival, and published texts.
My published work combines an analysis of literary and theoretical texts with archives as wide-ranging as zines, comics, diaries, newsletters, film, social media, and prison penpal snail mail correspondences. I am interested in how media studies can resist homonormativity, pinkwashing, and cultural assimilation by looking back at queer/trans legacies of ongoing activism and resistance.
I strive to centre disability justice and crip theory within my work so that my research can remain in conversation with grassroots cultural and activist movements beyond academic audiences alone. I am also interested in creative projects, as my academic and theoretical research informs my own creative work including queer/trans musical performance, art, and fiction.
Selected Publications
Fink, Marty. Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care (Rutgers UP)