Department of Gender Studies

Emerald concerns herself with questions of transfeminine embodiment as well as the contradictions and complications of power.  She completed her MA at the University of North Carolina Greensboro's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and in doing so producer her thesis, "Cute Racist:  On White Trans Women's Appropriative Embodiment of East Asian Aesthetics", which engages interview-based research with white trans women who make use of East Asian aesthetic forms as a means of enacting gendered embodiment.  She has more recently turned her attention to filmic representations and embodiments of trans femininity, paying special attention to the role of trans agency within those depictions.  Her article, "Saturated Femininities: Trans Women in Porn Beyond the Shemale", published in Porn Studies, expands the existing genealogy of the "shemale" figure within pornography and her racialized counterparts.