PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate and critical platform studies scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am originally from New York City and completed my undergraduate degree in English and African-American studies at the University of Virginia. My research and teaching is concerned with how our everyday media habits and engagement with popular culture are imbued with histories and systems of power. Additionally, I am a writer who has been featured in The Fashion and Race Database, Flow Journal, and The Daily Tarheel. Outside of school, I am a lover of art, travel, and really good food.
My dissertation looks at modern-day forms of techno-minstrelsy that animate the influencer industry, and its relationship to beauty capital in the United States. Specifically, I argue that, while minstrelsy and blackface have a specific history, newer technologies, such as the algorithms and affordances of social media, enable the continuation of minstrel practices in online spaces that reproduce racialized economic logic. I am interested in how this history of minstrelsy extends to the contemporary, where “ideal” users—those who copy, embody, and perform Blackness for white audiences—play on America’s appetite for Black culture while continuing to reject the Black body itself. I frame this analysis of techno-minstrelsy by positioning it within beauty capital, which I approach as a framework through which we can theorize the importance, economic capacity, and racial implications of beauty. Though much has been written on the ways that whiteness and beauty have created aesthetic hierarchies, scholarship around influencers—while critiquing neoliberal and meritocratic logics that especially account for gender and labor—have often failed to consider the importance of race. Therefore, my goal is to put influencer studies in conversation with critical race studies to consider the ways hierarchies of race and racialized aesthetics permeate and organize even techno-social spaces that are considered ‘diverse’ or agentic. I am especially interested in mapping how “ideal” users benefit from their beauty capital in ways that mirror and reinforce social hierarchies of racialized economic and social success and contend with the ways that techno-minstrelsy is sustained through platform affordances and algorithms. I offer the appropriation of Jalaiah Harmon’s “Renegade” dance by Charli D’Amelio as a case study that demonstrates these tensions.