TAPS/Music
I am a joint PhD candidate in Music (ethnomusicology) and TAPS. My dissertation project broadly concerns popular understandings of sex and desire within the U.S. erotophobic public sphere across the 20th and 21st century in relation to trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) cultural production and forms of self-making in relation to sex work. I am interested in tracing social constructions of sex, sexuality, and desire precisely where they intersect with the elaboration of structural oppressions. Theoretically, I draw primarily from women of color and Black feminisms, transfeminist Marxist cultural studies, and performance studies to ask how embodiment and experience continue to create ways of knowing that are devalued or denied in institutional productions of knowledge. More nearly, what continues to enable the age-old advertising dogma that “sex sells” while the act of selling sex remains technically illegal and socially abject? How do trans and gender nonconforming artists and erotic laborers trouble dominant understandings of the racial and the sexual within their own forms of cultural production around sex work, sexuality, and desire?