Department of Gender Studies

Emerald concerns herself with questions of embodiment as well as the complications and contradictions of power.  Her most recent Master's thesis, "Cute Racist:  On White Trans Women's Appropriative Embodiment of East Asian Aesthetics" submits the term "appropriative embodiment" into such discourse.  Appropriative embodiment refers to the ways that groups who are oppressed, for example through transness and womanhood, engage in appropriation or appropriative acts enabled by a privileged social position, such as whiteness.  Decolonial frameworks such as Orientalism and Ornamentalism inform her analyses.  Her thesis, which focuses on both physical and virtual forms of gendered embodiment, employs interview-based research as well as media analysis.  In particular, virtual communities, fandom and memes are of interest to her.