Theoretical and empirical inquiries into queer geographies have focused primarily on how white gay subjects navigate urban landscapes. Consequently, there has been little empirical work that examines (1) queer placemaking within Black and brown urban spaces; (2) placemaking among queer women of color; and (3) the relationship and interplay between...
This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness....
This dissertation is a performance ethnography that chronicles the experiences of Black and Latinx transgender women in the ballroom scenes of Chicago, Illinois and London, England. The dissertation engages 65 Black and Latinx transwomen and offers a theory of embodied knowledge—that is, the harnessing of lived experiences of racial, gender,...
This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed...
This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance...
This dissertation elucidates the contemporary dance studio and stage in twenty-first century Senegal as privileged sites of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. Entangled within local and global dance lineages, funding structures, and modes of circulation, contemporary choreographers perform their bodies in ways that challenge predominant narratives, both those imagined...
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the United States expanded the scale, funding, and technological sophistication of its defense resources, enabling its current standing as the dominant global military superpower. This dissertation examines the role that the popular narrative genre of science fiction played in shaping American cultural...
Public memory studies in rhetoric have typically neglected how we use shared memories to form, maintain, and pass down social norms through the objects we encounter and the practices we participate in during our everyday lives. This is especially true for children’s toys, because they are understood as essential objects...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...