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Research

“‘How Not to Get Killed’: Feminist Aftercare in the Dorothy Allison Papers.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 48(4), 2023. (Access Here)

Born from a deep dive into Dorothy Allison’s published works and personal papers, this article proposes a praxis of perverting the archives to make room for promiscuous readings that emerge from the unpredictable confluence of pleasure and danger in archival research. I argue that perverted readings can serve as an imperative form of aftercare (to borrow from S/M terminology) that opens up multiple pathways for excavating the webs of care that arose during the lesbian/feminist sex wars. Allison and her work with S/M communities convey a sexual politics rooted in reflexivity, critique, and a lesbian feminist framework of collective care for women’s sexual realties. Moreover, I argue that narrating histories of the sex wars through the lenses of care work and erotic labor creates more possibilities for holding together the diverse perspectives that constituted these debates, which tend to be glossed in popular accounts of feminist histories as dichotomous or otherwise at odds with each other.

“‘I was returning to see if the ghosts were still astirring’: Southern Lesbian Reflexivity as Social Movement in Feminary (1979-1982).” Journal of Lesbian Studies (26)1, 2022. (Access here)

This article examines an instructive moment in the archive of Feminary, a periodical that began in 1969 as a local feminist newsletter for the Triangle region of North Carolina. In 1979, the editorial collective announced a shift in focus toward “a feminist journal for the South emphasizing the lesbian vision.” I argue that through this turn, the Feminary Collective experiments with lesbian and southern as discursive laboratories for shaping what I refer to as backward-onward community-formation—a praxis that requires confronting and acknowledging historical specificity and experiential limits while also imagining new possibilities for social movement. Instead of framing southernness and lesbianism as fixed identities, the Collective treats them as multivalent, slippery markers that resist closure, produce ambivalence, and contain vast relational and political potential. Moreover, this article discusses the Collective’s configuration of the U.S. South as a spatial and temporal avenue for confronting the experiential and institutionalized afterlives of slavery and for critiquing the white-washed classism of literary conventions. The article’s methodology includes close readings of material from the Collective’s nationally-circulated journal, as well as discussions of excerpts from the oral histories of two former members of the Collective, one of which was conducted for the purposes of this project.