My research focuses on issues of race, disability, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture.
My first book, “Bodyminds Reimagined,” analyzes representations of disability, race and gender in black women’s speculative fiction, arguing that this non-realist genre provides unique ways to explore social systems and the relationships between them. I have also written about race, disability, and gender in popular culture, like in the films “Avatar” and in the Wisconsin-based American Girl brand.
My current research project explores how black activists, specifically the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, have addressed disability as a political concern in ways that differ from the mainstream, predominantly white, disability rights movement.
As an interdisciplinary scholar – meaning my work crosses disciplinary boundaries including literature, history, and ethnography – the thing that links all my work is not the objects I study (a book, a film, dolls or archival materials), but the political and social issues that these objects help us understand.
What are the relationships between racism, sexism, ableism – discrimination against disabled people – and other forms of oppression?
How have marginalized groups – such as women, disabled people, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer people, transgender and non-binary people – sometimes done harm to one another or to multiply marginalized people with their group, such as queer people of color, in their fight for collective liberation?
What I aim to accomplish with my research is an understanding of the relationships between oppressions in our modern world so that, perhaps, in conversation with the many brilliant scholars, artists and activists I read and work with, we can develop new strategies for political and social change that can address multiple oppressions at once and refuse to leave anyone behind.
I bring this work to the classroom by encouraging my students to ask questions of their own assumptions.
What beliefs do you hold that you have never questioned? How did you come to know what you think you know about people who are different from you? From TV and movies? From your parents or community of origin? Who benefits from these beliefs and who suffers?
Are the beliefs you hold helping you be your highest and best self – helping you make the world better – or are these beliefs holding you back from that?
What I love about teaching in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies is that my students come open, earnest and eager to learn.
I learn from and with my students constantly and every year at least one student e-mails me to say that my class changed their thinking, even changed their life or career path.
Everyone needs to have a basic understanding of systems of oppression because all of us will interact with people different from us and potentially hold power over people less privileged than ourselves. We need to understand our role within these systems in order to change them for the better.
This essay originally appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal’s Fueling Discovery section on May 4, 2020. Fueling Discovery is a special partnership between the Wisconsin State Journal and the College of Letters & Science.