My work addresses the history and theory of interpretation under capitalism, with a focus on the ascription of sexual meaning to flesh. Embarking from the psychoanalytic insight that flesh is both meaningless and the means by which meaning becomes possible, I have studied rarefied and complex construals of flesh in a set of highly-specific historical circumstances: the late-Victorian obsession with Japanese effeminacy (in my first book, Quaint, Exquisite); the emergence of the transsexual as a focal point for modern ideas about bodily technique (in my second scholarly monograph, Pleasure and Efficacy); the rigorous making and unmaking of the modern heterosexual in the postwar sitcom (in my third scholarly monograph, Closures); and in the late-liberal period’s cinematic, literary, and metaphysical narratives of demonic possession (in my current research project, “Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism”). I also work creatively in prose as an author of autobiographical writing, generic and stylistic pastiche, and fiction, exploring alongside my critical work the generic and formal frameworks within which the body becomes writable. My first memoir, Please Miss, was published by Seal in 2022----through revisions and rotations of a central set of metaphors and images, the book explores the various meanings ascribed to the ghastly, whitened face of a circus clown, a figure through which conflictual determinations of racialization, sexual aversion, and subjectivation converge.
I am completing a monograph about contemporary demonology and possession narratives, and two novels; one about constitutional law, the other about the West Midlands of England.
