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Current Research
Rhinestones & Resistance: Burlesque, Infrapolitics, and the Labor of Survival in France and the United States
Academic Articles
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Works in Progress
Dances of Resistance
Audacity: What No One Tells Women About Midlife
Current Research
Rhinestones & Resistance: Burlesque, Infrapolitics, and the Labor of Survival in France and the United States
Penn State University, 2025 to 2026. Conducted with Penn State IRB approval.
The study was designed after Dobbs to examine reproductive justice activism. It shifted when interviews centered racial exclusion, precarity, and community conflict. Neo-burlesque is often framed as feminist empowerment. This study asks a different question: how do performers sustain resistance in environments that penalize it?
The study
Eleven interviews with performers and producers (eight in the United States, three in France)
Observation at eleven venues (six in the United States, five in France)
Reflexive analysis of the researcher's position as a community member
All participants are pseudonymized.
Four forms of resistance
Explicit: political issues named directly
Embodied: resistance carried out through the body and performance itself
Relational: resistance built through community care and collective support
Infrapolitical: low-visibility resistance, such as strategic modulation of political content by venue, audience, and risk (after James C. Scott)
The argument
Using Scott's infrapolitics and feminist care ethics, the study proposes the constrained ecosystem: a cultural space in which resistance is possible but limited by economic precarity, gatekeeping, community policing, and social risk. Performers in both countries calibrate how, whether, and at what cost to resist, but the pressures differ: political polarization and rights retrenchment in the United States, racial exclusion beneath republican universalism in France. The study argues that attrition, not censorship, is the greatest threat to burlesque resistance, and that performers sustain resistance through collective labor and care that costs them.
Presenting at NWSA 2026, Friday, November 6. See the NWSA 2026 page for session details and the abstract.
Works in Progress
Audacity: What No One Tells Women About Midlife
A feminist book about midlife that treats it as a reckoning with the cultural, historical, and structural forces that have shaped women's lives since adolescence, not a crisis to manage. Drawing on women's and gender studies, somatic psychology, and contemplative traditions, it moves from naming the systems, to reclaiming the self, to acting in the world with recovered authority. Nonfiction manuscript in progress.
Dances of Resistance Global Archive
An independent project to build a publicly accessible multimedia database of dance traditions across six continents, organized by resistance typology: explicit, embodied, relational, and infrapolitical. In development.