Current Research

I’m currently developing several articles and book chapters for publication. Some of those projects include:

A rhetorical genealogy of the term “pre-existing condition” in the history of American healthcare. The United States is the only “high income” country in the world that does not guarantee health insurance to its citizens. Indeed, the U.S.’s reliance on private health insurance has had terrible outcomes: we spend more money on health care than any other country but experience worse health outcomes than our peers. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, private insurance companies were permitted to deny coverage to those who lived with any previously diagnosed condition. As a result, those living with conditions such as cancer, diabetes, brain injuries, or any disability were left to fend for themselves. These deplorable practices were not equally distributed among the population, but had a disproportionately lethal impact on people of color, women, LGBTQ folk, or those living with disabilities. This study traces the origins of the term “pre-existing conditions,” its insidious manifestations, and the efforts of advocates and activists to pass legislation that removed its presence in the law.

An essay about the tropes of utopia and apocalypse in the television series The Last of Us. The program invites viewers to contemplate the prospects of a future radically rewritten by disaster. The series offers spectators the opportunity to ponder what life would have been like during the last two decades had the course of history gone in a markedly different direction. This includes many of the legislative and cultural accomplishments of LGBTQ political movements, which no longer exist in the program’s universe. The series maintains a tradition of engaging the tropes of utopia and apocalypse, which have long structured LGBTQ movement rhetoric. The transformative space occupied by these characters, which mirror Foucault’s understanding of heterotopias, is both suspiciously sentimental but also aspirationally satisfying.

A book chapter about the role LGBT publics played in the evolution of the so-called culture wars, especially in the struggle over HIV/AIDS. Sparring with cultural conservatives crafted a dialogical mode of address, with each side using the other to fortify public identities, galvanize social campaigns, and organize political acrimony for the next several decades.

An article that scrutinizes the role of “dignity” in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. Although commentators and activists were deeply suspicious of dignity’s role in the same-sex marriage decision, I treat the term as an ideograph to detail how we might productively engage the idea with discourses of social change. I suggest that dignity occupies a critical space among other ideographs in contemporary law, specifically those of “liberty” and “equality.” Dignity does much more than act as a stable referent for a rights-based discourse. Rather, it fluidly navigates the rhetorical architecture of liberty and equality in the service of rendering gay and lesbian bodies material within universal understandings of personhood that are necessary to both legal reasoning and cultural ascriptions of the human. The recent recomposition of the Supreme Court threatens such a reading because the conservative majority may render an anti-gay opinion regardless of previous constitutional protections.