writing
BOOK
Extra Ordinary Violence: Performance, Race, and the Making of U.S. Gun Culture. Manuscript in progress.
In this book, I use performance theory, legal studies, cultural geography, and critical race theory to make the argument that gun ownership and brandishment are performative gestures of belonging that make claims on the state for the right to participate in civic life—but that the reception and effectiveness of those gestures are conditioned on proximity to whiteness, and that the juridical structures that underpin gun culture in the US are shaped by pervasive anti-Blackness and ongoing settler colonialism. Analyzing gun ownership as a key performance of civic belonging illuminates how racial subjectivity is formed and reveals how gun culture in the United States has both drawn on and mobilized performance in order to legitimize rights for some Americans while undercutting those rights for others. Reading the gun as a theatrical conductor and material archive, I also argue that the object itself telegraphs subconscious histories of violence and scripts embodied behaviors. Through an examination of legal cases, theatrical and everyday performances, and archival materials, I map out how the interaction between gun law and everyday performances worked at distinct moments in U.S. history: 1) during the drafting of the Bill of Rights; 2) during Reconstruction and the Nadir of U.S. race relations; 3) during the settler colonialist expansion into the West; and 4) during the long Civil Rights movement. The final chapter of the book takes up contemporary “Do-It-Yourself” defense, concealed carry law, and the racialized surveillance of and violence toward Black and Indigenous Americans.
articles + essays
“Shooting from Windows: Performing Tactical Lawfulness During Jim Crow.” Theatre Survey. 63.1 (January 2022): 63-89.
“From Self-Defense to Self-Deputization: Defensive Gun Use and the Performance of Reasonable Belief.” Second Thoughts. January 7, 2022.
“Good [Black] Guys With Guns: Performance and the Anti-Black Logic of US Gun Culture.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. 9.1 (Spring 2020).
“Introduction: US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty.” Co-authored with Alex Trimble Young. Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. 9.1 (Spring 2020).
"Brandishing Guns: Performing Race and Belonging in the American West." journal of visual culture. 17.3 (December 2018): 343-355.
"Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement." In Performance In a Militarized Culture, edited by Lindsey Mantoan and Sara Brady. New York: Routledge, 2017.
"'This is the Place': Performance and the Production of Space in Mormon Cultural Memory." In Enacting History, edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice Malloy. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011.
"'To Do It Is Nothing, To Be Said to Have Done It is Everything': The Theatrical Oscar Wilde and Possibilities for the (Re)Construction of Biography." a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 24.1 (Summer 2009): 15-33.
"The Place, Space, and Voice of Rebellion: Limits of Transgression in Henry IV, Part I." The Journal of the Wooden O Symposium. 4 (2004): 91-9.
edited journal section
Gun Culture. Special forum section in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, co-edited with Alex Trimble Young. Spring 2020.
public writing
“Gun Studies Syllabus.” Public Books. With Caroline Light.
“Vocabulary Guide for Liberation.” Street Dance Activism: Global Dance Meditation. Collaboratively authored.
performance + book reviews
Performance review of Goodnight, Tyler, by B.J. Tindal. Theatre Journal 72.1 (March 2020): 112-113.
Book review of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In by Laura Levin. Theatre Survey 57.3 (September 2016): 491-93.
Book Review of Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning by Scott Magelssen. TDR 59.3 (Fall 2015): 176-78.
Performance Review of The Persian Quarter, by Kathleen Cahill. Theatre Journal 63.4 (December 2011): 644-46.