PUBLICATIONS
Honorable Mention, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for Most Outstanding Book Published in American Studies, American Studies Association
Honorable Mention, Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies
Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through cultural discourses of aesthetic value that mark them as sexual “others,” and how in turn, aesthetic value is generated through the presentation of their bodies. Finding that the styles of working class Black and Latina women and girls generate cultural capital when appropriated in contemporary art, while drawing mockery and denigration in everyday contexts, the book argues that aesthetics of excess are targeted for regulation when embodied by women and girls of color because they signify forms of class, gender, sexual, and racial difference that agitate norms of respectability and social mobility. Conversely, when classified as “art,” these aesthetics generate value in galleries and museums as ironic, streetwise, and edgy.
Through innovative relational readings of Black and Latina sexual racialization, Aesthetics of Excess shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship.
University of California Press
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
CAA Reviews
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research
Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
Nicki Minaj and Pretty Taking All Fades: Performing the Erotics of Feminist Solidarity
co-authored with Anya M. Wallace
The Feminist Wire
Girls’ Sexuality in the Media
Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Rachel Lachowicz
Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists
Films for the Feminist Classroom
National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Journal