I am a multi-disciplinary, cross-genre writer, scholar, and artist. In my critical work, I discover new connections between historical time periods and reveal the trace of the past in the present. My work brings together diverse archives of cultural objects, including 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature, film, media, and performance. I put into conversation texts which are not normally viewed as aesthetically or conceptually interrelated. In my artistic practice, I use a wide range of media to bring forward the complexities of identity discovery and subject formation. I describe my work as “serious play”; I love to “get messy” in everything I do. My monograph, Masculinity in Transition (2023), winner of the Popular Culture Association’s 2025 John Leo & Dana Heller Award, is currently available from University of Minnesota Press and anywhere else you buy books. I am an associate professor and coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

In Masculinity in Transition, I coined the term “unruly alliances” for the bonds that form across lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, and it has shaped everything I’ve written since. I’m now writing butch., a book about butch as a style rather than an identity, and what that style has protected, revealed, and passed down.