About
I am currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. I received my PhD from Melbourne University, Australia in 2009.
Research: Broadly, I research how biopolitical technologies of race, gender, transnationality, medicalization and political economy shape and are shaped by transgender and queer bodies. I am particularly interested in how geographical location and histories of colonialism have fostered or subtended different gender variant and queer subjectivities. My research to date has focused on diverse sites: the political economies of travel for gender reassignment surgery; tracing circuits of affective labor within trans and queer migration; writing about whiteness as a shifting ideal within transnational economies of body modification in Thailand; and interrogating concepts of homonationalism, biopolitics and necropolitics as they relate to gender variant life.
I have taught on a wide variety of topics including introductions to gender studies; the history of gender, race and settler colonialism in Australia; scientific understandings of sexuality/gender; transnational body modification; representations of the body; and transnational transgender studies.
I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. Before pursuing doctoral work, I worked as a media activist and editor at the height of the no borders and counter-capitalist protests of the early 2000s. I moved to the United States in June 2009 to spend two years living in Bloomington, Indiana, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Indiana University.