I am Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and Visiting Associate Research Professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. I earned my PhD in Romance Studies (French) from Duke University in 2009. As a theorist, I focus on the materialist genealogies of contemporary queer and trans political ideals and cultural values. I have been awarded a Cornell Society for the Humanities fellowship (2023-4), a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship on “Sex” from the University of Pennsylvania (2015-16), and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University (2015).

My first book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017), won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Through a focus on prostitute, thief, author, and activist, Jean Genet (1910-1986), Disturbing Attachments interrogates the unspoken desires that orient the field of Queer Studies. Genet epitomizes the queer hope that social deviance and sexual transgression should birth radical art and politics. Disturbing Attachments troubles this expectation by focusing on the unsavory attachments – including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of terrorism – behind Genet's activism with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. The book demonstrates how contemporary queer attachments to anti-normativity, sexual transgression, and political radicalism bear the stamp of recent gay American history. Ultimately, Disturbing Attachments challenges scholars to disturb the idealizations of queer theory so that Queer Studies can reorient itself to an expanded range of geographic, historical, and racial subjects.

My second monograph in progress, Trans Materialism without Gender Identity, argues in favor of abandoning gender identity as the core principle of transgender politics, culture, and medicine. Through my method of materialist genealogy, I find that gender identity enshrines one white, Western, and middle-class transition path as the only legitimate one. This is the transition path that begins with introspection, hypothesizes an internal gender identity, then makes medical, social, and legal claims based on that gender identity. However, historically speaking, poor and working-class trans people have tended to transition for materialist reasons rather than for reasons of internal gender identity. The book finds that the transgender liberalism responsible for enshrining gender identity is the artefact of white, middle-class trans people’s successful struggle to make their class interests hegemonic within trans culture. The result is what I term middle-class transgender hegemony. Ultimately, Trans Materialism without Gender Identity makes the case that if all trans people – particularly poor Black trans women and trans women of color – are to flourish, we must liberate trans politics and culture from middle-class transgender hegemony and transform it into a politics of class solidarity with poor and sex-working trans people, particularly low-income Black trans women.

I have published articles in journals including TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Social Text, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Representations. I am the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Queer Form.” I serve on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women’s Studies and was a review editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies from 2015 to 2023.

Fall 2024: Poetics and Politics of Sex: The Queer/Trans Underground 

Spring 2025: Feminist and Queer Theory: Marxism, Trans Studies

https://www.dukeupress.edu/disturbing-attachments