Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Venetian women began musical training in childhood to become professional musicians, known as figlie di coro (daughters of the choir), in the four charitable Ospedali Maggiori. These women overcame childhood poverty and abandonment to awe prestigious guests with their skills and even...
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a surge of public interest in and discussion around racial reckoning. Universities in the United States and across the globe are grappling with their historical associations with transatlantic and chattel slavery. This dissertation takes up the question of...
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 explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
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 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 aims to rethink how contemporary feminism might grapple with complicity, cooptation, and the concomitant failure of feminist successes through a frame other than paradox. Arguing that the paradox frame locks us into a set of “dead ends,” I shift to an orientation toward spaces between. Through sustained engagement...
This dissertation considers how women’s spectatorship—how women are imagined as viewing subjects, and what are defined as feminine ways of watching—is transformed by digital technologies, and what it reveals about the shifting nature of privacy and visibility. It maps the contours of our current configuration of gendered looking relations by...
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...