Understanding how performance can reinforce or challenge oppressive systems drives my work.
My research engages the intersections of popular performance, media circulation, and white violence, especially in the US South. Rather than focusing on explicit white supremacist movements, I foreground supposedly “apolitical” and joyful physical practices—like dance, beauty influencing, yoga, and so on—to expose how far-right beliefs can regularly infiltrate mainstream US culture in insidious ways. For example, my dissertation is a critical ethnographic examination of competitive dance in Louisville, Kentucky, which uncovers how local trends in the practice implicitly perpetuate white supremacist bodily ideals and interpersonal expectations; and how they also financially contribute to Christian nationalist organizing through the economic infrastructures of competition dance platforms.
