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 post-2016 period’s cinematic, literary, and metaphysical narratives of demonic possession (in my fourth, Personal Demons). 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 presently in an early stage of research towards a longue durée history of what I call "moral anatomy"––the notion that the anatomical body possesses a formal exactitude that warrants particular ethical and legal treatment. The project's foci are, at present: animal écorchés in eighteenth century British painting; Romantic figurations of dancing as a model of social organization; the enslaved body as a limit case for moral anatomy; Freud's early interest in the reproductive anatomy of eels; "fatness" as a literary style; and the anorexic imagination in contemporary French cinema.
