Research
Transgender media representation and beauty standards
Through textual and visual analysis of media objects, ranging from representations of transgender women in fashion magazines and vlogs produced by trans women social media influencers, I show how the rise of trans media representations has worked to reproduce normative ideals of femininity for trans women. More specifically, I argue that the fashionably ideal trans woman is characterized by her whiteness, access to class privilege and social capital, and ability to pass as cisgender. Trans women and femmes of color, meanwhile, are characterized as exceptional figures in ways that depoliticize their activist work in order to integrate them into the fashion system.
Portions of this research have been published in Feminist Media Studies and Communication, Culture & Critique.
Trans femme of color theory
Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participatory focus groups with trans women and femmes—primarily trans women and femmes of color—I develop a trans femme of color theory that understands trans femme cultural formations as necessarily imbricated with processes of racialization. I explore how trans women and femmes of color make sense of dominant images of trans women in the media, how they negotiate their raced and gendered bodies, identities, and experiences, and how they navigate racist and transphobic publics. I outline strategies that trans femmes of color use to construct their own subjectivities, such as by claiming culturally specific gender labels in addition to the category of woman, including the Filipino babaylan, the Latin American travesti, and the Black American stud. I argue that these identity formations allow trans femmes of color to claim their own agency and become producers of knowledge.
Trans femme of color cultural production and resistance
I apply trans femme of color theory to the study of media by focusing on the works of trans women of color filmmakers and artists Isabel Sandoval, Tourmaline, and Juliana Huxtable. I explore how their cultural productions, which include film, photography, and visual art practice, construct counternarratives that contest dominant understandings of race and trans womanhood. In particular, I trace how their bodies of work create linkages between past, present, and future, collapsing trans femme temporalities in ways that defy colonial and heteronormative understandings of time and history. I argue that trans femme of color cultural production disrupt hegemonic binaries between masculine and feminine, past and present, human and inhuman, to imagine alternatives ways of being.
Gender and racial diversity in fashion branding and advertising
I interrogate the cultural economy of gender and racial diversity in fashion branding and advertising, focusing on fashion retailers that target trans consumers, such as the Phluid Project; beauty advertising campaigns that feature trans women of color, such as Sephora’s “We Belong to Something Beautiful” campaign; and cosmetics companies founded by trans women, such as Nikkie de Jager’s Nimya, Julie Vu’s Deja Vu Beauty, and Nikita Dragun’s Dragun Beauty. I pay particular attention to how these brands make use of digital affordances, such as the advertising and e-commerce functions on social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, to attract Generation Z consumers, whom marketers imagine to be uniquely queer and digitally connected. Ultimately, I argue that these branding and advertising campaigns use digital media to further a consumer activist project that conflates spending power and purchasing activities with social justice and political action.