“The brief, unbridled laughter Clare and Irene share indexes both threads at the same time: two should-be lovers laughing at the absurdity of a racist joke about the impossibility of Clare being Black. The absurdity of the joke anchors the inside joke between Clare and Irene, which is both that they are Black and that they want to fuck.“

Read the full piece—replete with GIFs—on the Black One Shot series website.

A breathless, interdisciplinary history of the use of “deviance” as a framework of analysis.

Published in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, eds. The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective (NYU Press, 2021).

You can read the full text of my entry here.

I conducted an extremely limited and abbreviated ethnography of black women curators working in a variety of arts institutions, situating their trials and triumphs within an arts institutional landscape that is both hiring more black women yet can do much more to support them holistically.

It was printed in an excellent but very expensive book, The African American Companion to Art History, so I’m doing my part for the people.

A tidy piece on the ways that black queer women mobilize slowness to contest the pace of neoliberal development that not only shapes the city but our practices of taking pleasure within it.

Published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 25 no. 4 (October 2019): 545-567.

An experiment in asking different kinds of questions about the ways that racialized, gendered, and queered embodiment is perceived and punished.

This article forecasts some of the questions of my second book, The Ontokinetics of Black Queer Life.

The journal I published in, Women & Performance, made the full text available!

A review of Oliverio Rodriguez's ongoing series The Last Seduction/La Seducción Fatal, examining how his images press against European and South American “masters” of painting through explicitly queer and kinky optics.

Published in Transgender Studies Quarterly.

The title is kind of self-explanatory. The essay isn’t very good tbh so I don’t really circulate it. You should absolutely pick up some copies of the art journal Monday, however, where it was published.

If by “job” we mean “continuing the violence that has always been at the very heart of the US.”

This piece is about the practice of teaching under Trump.

You can find the full text, published by QED, here.

I loved writing this piece ages ago and people keep turning to it, which I love. Someday I’ll flesh it out into a longer piece (I kind of did it in “Black/Queer/Women/Lean.”

It was originally published on Sounding Out!. You can also find a handsome French translation by Audiomat. La Casa Encendida has a Spanish translation in the works as well.