These projects refuse linearity. They don’t begin and end so much as surface, recede, and resurface—taking form through slow, recursive acts of making and thinking.
This new project combines research and creative work exploring trans embodiment and the voice through the lens of “trans acousticity” and collective rewilding.
A manifesto piece is forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly, expected in 2026.
My contribution to The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies (2025) also considers questions of labor, the voice, and trans embodiment.
I presented for Lyric Opera about the history of the live voice in drag performance in Chicago, tracing it to operettas and minstrel shows in the mid-1800s and the work of Francis Leon.
Melodramas of the Midwest, Center on Halsted, 2024
Queer History Symposium, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, 2024
In 2024, I presented at the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives Queer History Symposium about histories of the live voice in drag performance. The piece expounded on photographic evidence and interviews of Miss Tillie (Chicago-based drag queen active from the late-1950s until her death in the 2000s) where she described her method of screaming over the record instead of a lip-sync. Through contextual clues, I have been able to situate her as one of the informants in Esther Newton’s seminal piece on drag culture Mother Camp (1972), which would place Miss Tillie’s career as active before, during, and after the gradual transition from live voice to lip-synching.
In 2021, I offered my reflections on the history of the live voice and lip-synching as they relate to trans embodiment in the form of public scholarship.