“Identity Temporalities and American Born Chinese” Inks: The Journal of the Comics StudiesSociety 4.1 (Spring 2020): 82-100.

American Born Chinese demonstrates how we should be attentive to the way that the temporality of comics calls upon readers to read identity—specifically in relationship to time and discourses of racial progress.

“The Cosby Lament: Rape, Marital Alibis, and Black Iconicity”differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29.2 (2018): 96-125.

This essay is an attempt to work through the nature of the cultural injury produced by the African American male celebrity—an injury that is frequently enacted as intimate violence—and to hypothesize why public accusations of such injuries so often affectively challenge black subjects. The idea of black male guilt circulates in the media as a black cultural injury, while heteronormative scripts are mobilized to offer not only innocence but repair.

“The Normative Broken: Melinda Gebbie, Feminist Comix, and Child SexualityTemporalities” American Literature 90.2 (2018): 347-375.

Lost Girls (2006) is a return to the themes explored by Melinda Gebbie and other underground feminist cartoonists in the 1970s and 1980s. Undergirded by a radical feminist perspective that sees injury as being embedded in many women’s experiences, the creation of community from the wound makes it normal to have been broken.

“Precarious Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31:2 (2016): 27-59.

Issa Rae's web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13), initially posted on YouTube, and Lena Dunham's Girls (HBO, 2012–) are examples of the precarious-girl comedy in the new millennium. Depicting female subjects who will never entirely escape abjection, these shows also highlight racial and class-based differences in the embrace of not only this twenty-first-century form of comedy but also in modes of self-fashioning in neoliberal times.

“African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies."Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20. 2015.

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies.

“Black Love is Not a Fairytale: African American Women, Romance, and Rhetoric.”POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetoric and Invention 7:2 (2011).

This essay explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacking how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism.

“Proms and Other Racial Ephemera: the Positive Social Construction of African Americans in the “Post”-Civil Rights Era.” Washington University Journal of Law and Public Policy 33 (2010): 75-107.

“The positive social construction of African Americans (1) makes it possible for people to say that negative social construction is not operating in a policy debate as positive social construction is perceived as the dominating discourse; (2) aids in attributing continued racial animus in the United States to individual bad actors and fails to connect such issues to the material harms produced by structural racism; and (3) facilitates the displacement of affect attached to the successes to the Civil Rights Movement to other policy issues.”

“Wearing Hero-face: The Dilemma of Black Patriotism in Truth: Red, White, and Black.”The Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (2009): 339-362.

“Truth’s black Captain America also serves to represent a melancholic patriotism affecting a wide variety of citizens—not in spite of his racial disenfranchisement but because of it.”

“The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event.” differences: A Journal of FeministCultural Studies 19.2 (2008): 99-126.

“The Lost Girl Event is defined by the others in the u.s. imaginary.Their existence is antithetical to the premises of fairy tales, their bodies are perpetually at risk. Many lost citizens never achieve the status of events, largely because they force a narrative about the more complex issues—such as poverty—that need to be addressed in order to make both children and adults safer.”

“Beyond a Just Syntax: Black Actresses, Hollywood, and Complex Personhood.” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 16:1(2006): 135-152.

“Too often, informal cultural analyses from varied political positions rely on a ‘just’ syntax: ‘Isn’t she just a mammy’, ‘just a prostitute’, ‘just cooning’, ‘just a welfare queen’, or ‘just a sellout?’”

“Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality.” Obsidian III 6/7:2/1 (2005/2006): 72-86.

“In Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Tal- entsy Butler ultimately presents the moral that the project of producing populist texts for mass consumption cannot be left to those with unproduc- tive or dangerous dreams, and abandoned by those who truly desire revolu- tion.

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“Whoopi Goldberg in Hollywood: Queering Comic Genealogies.” Hysterical: Women in American Comedy. Eds. Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant. University of Texas Press, 2017.

This chapter tracks Whoopi Goldberg’s play with belonging in comedy through incongruence—largely through expansive use of what I would describe as drag. Goldberg both disrupts idealized constructions and naturalizes a Black female presence in Hollywood genres.