Fields of Interest
Biography
I work in feminist, queer, and trans theory. At its broadest, my research considers twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and scientific representations of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. I am especially interested in understanding the relationship between these representations and embodied, sentient experience on this planet, earth. I am especially interested in writing autotheoretically, blending the conventions of philosophy, memoir, and cultural criticism.
My 2023 book, Nonbinary: A Feminist Autotheory (Cambridge UP), argues that movement between 'woman' and 'nonbinary' is possible, affectively and politically. In fact, a nonbinary structure of feeling has been central in the history of feminist thought, such as in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). This structure of feeling is not antifeminist but indexical of a desire for a form of embodiment and relationality beyond binary sex and gender. The book also traces the development of the term "nonbinary" in online spaces of the early 2000s. While it might be tempting to read its development as symptomatic of the forms of selfhood reproduced in (neo)liberal, racialized platform capitalism, this reading is too simplistic because it misses how the term emerged within communities of care.
My 2019 book, Earthly Encounters: Feminist Theory, Sensation and the Anthropocene (SUNY Press), investigates human sensations of the more-than-human world: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. I show how these sensations are unevenly distributed within social worlds and are productive of racial, ethnic, national and gendered subjectivities. The book makes a case for the continued relevance of phenomenology and sentient experience within the context of the Anthropocene.
My publications have appeared in Signs, Social Text, differences, and GLQ. I work on a variety of sources: from genome-wide association studies to queer cinema.
Prior to joining UW, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, the University of Oxford, and Syracuse University, and a faculty member at the University of Buffalo.