This dissertation considers how 21 trans and queer teenagers learned to create livable lives in unlivable worlds through routine participation on social media. Through a multi-year partnership with an interdisciplinary gender program in Chicago, I employed a humanizing qualitative design anchored by interview and participatory visual methods over three nested...
Although research has shown LGBTQ+ youth are overrepresented in counts of homeless youth, scholars have yet to investigate whether this trend exists among adults experiencing homelessness. This dissertation uses an organizational analysis of four Chicago homeless centers that cater to young adults to argue that most LGBTQ+ youth are not...
Histories of digital media, software, and computing are inseparable from histories of queer and transgender life. Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History situates visual media like video glitch art, the computer’s graphical user interface, video games, and computer operating systems as the product of historical...
This dissertation examines how China’s involvement in transnational LGBTQ activism, adaptation and innovation of queer media technologies, and the global pink economy have influenced queer men’s understandings of selfhood, sexual desires, and the relationships among queer subjects. It is based on extensive fieldwork in Beijing and digital ethnography on China’s...
“Queer Correspondence: Form and Femininity in the Long Eighteenth Century” interrogates the role that the epistolary form played in the construction, representation, and discipline of female gender expressions and sexualities across the eighteenth century. Working from the perspectives of queer theory, formal analysis, and literary history, this dissertation argues that...
In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt analyzes how routine modes of debt and indebtedness restrict black women’s behavior across the everyday sphere and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Modes of indebtedness are characteristic of racial capitalism and...
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...