This essay argues that certain print pornography featuring “crossdresser,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” subjects was, counterintuitively, part of a distributed information and care network by and for US transfeminine people between the 1970s and 1990s. Email me for a PDF, or you can find here via the Feminist Media Histories site.
With Aren Aizura. We wrote about rapid-onset gender dysphoria, trans poetics, and trans porn. This free access link will work for a while. Also happy to send you a PDF.
My collaborative essay with Cameron Awkward-Rich and Amy Marvin was one of the top five most-read articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly for the year 2020. That means it will be intermittently open-access; you can also always email me and I’ll send you a copy.
There’s a lot more I could say about this essay, including the fact that I don’t want it to be understood primarily as a rejoinder to Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager’s “After Trans Studies” (although, of course, it is explicitly in conversation with that piece). Instead, I hope it is read as much as a larger meditation on how academic knowledge and field formation are effects of the material conditions of academic laborers.
For The Rumpus, I interviewed Malcolm Tariq about Southernness, sexuality, and snacks. Tariq’s first book of poetry is called Heed the Hollow (Greywolf Press).
Malcolm Tariq (Photo credit: Hao Feng)
For Make Magazine, a review of Andrea Lawlor’s gorgeous Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl that doubles as my most literary subtweet of some prominent queer theorists.
“…a story that older queer people sometimes tell about their millennial counterparts is that they—we—worry too much about sex.”
Dawn on E Jefferson St., Court Square, Charlottesville, VA. (Bob Mical/Flickr)
For Nursing Clio, I wrote about public memory, white supremacy, and Pokémon Go.
"I am ashamed to play Pokémon Go at an Unmarked Slave Graveyard, and I am also ashamed that without Pokémon Go, I may never have known that there is this small memorial in my neighborhood."
Cover image of Hillary Chute's Disaster Drawn
I wrote a review of Hillary L. Chute's monograph Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. I've been a fan of non-fiction comics since high school, so it was super fun to close-read this brilliant analysis of the genre. I also got to write about my first queer crush, Susan Sontag.
Tobias, dreamboat hawk and trans icon.
A personal essay for the LA Review of Books channel Avidly about gender, transformation, and Scholastic Book Fairs. Includes the phrases "dreamboat orphan" and "transsexual literary critic."
Adjusted Margin, an academic book about queer life, feminist activism, and office equipment
Here's a book review I published in Make literary magazine. Includes key phrases like: "I Want A Dyke for President," "xerography as a political and artistic form," and "reproductions of their butts."