AREAS OF INTEREST
I find myself constantly chasing the highs of the "aha" moments where you realize that simple acts: greeting a friend, brushing your teeth, or washing a dish can be performed in an endless variety of ways. I love the feeling of having the rug pulled out from under me when I learn that something I assumed was universal just isn't.
After looking back at the work I have created over the last ten years I began to notice patterns. Drawn to people's family histories and social worlds, I'm forever curious by how we attempt to circumvent social rules and norms in order to meet our desires. Whether it be love, sex, or general acceptance, humans have developed very clever ways of getting what we want.
I'm especially interested in families: how we define them, the laws we create to uphold them, how we interact within them, and the strategies we use to create them. I'm particularly fascinated with men's relationships to their family and how the unspoken rules of masculinity can complicate and limit relationships.
MASCULINITY
The thread that ties all my work together is men. Whether it be truck drivers enduring the loneliness on the road away from their families or middle class Chinese men looking for brides, I am curious how men go about perform manhood and how their gestures of masculinity relate to family. My upbringing in a small farming village in rural America has heavily influenced my work as has my relationship with my blue-collar father and my (late) white-collar stepfather. As a member of both families I was given front row seats to two opposing views of what it means to be a man. Their respective demonstrations of masculinity, were not unlike Chinese ideas of wen (cultured/learned masculinity) and wu (physical masculinity). While my stepfather valued educational degrees and provided for his family through financial means, my biological father valued physical skills and provided for his family through his bodily labor in the act of repairing objects. In the context of China, my work investigates how "leftover men" (shengnan) mobilize both forms of masculinity (wen and wu) in the acquisition of finding a suitable marriage partner, and how the understandings of their own masculinity hinge on their ability to form a family.
QUEER KINSHIP
My interest in non-normative families is rooted in my own identity as a pansexual non-monogamous person as well as being a child of a multicultural blended family, with multiple marriages, siblings with different degrees of blood relations and drastically different age ranges. In my academic life this is reflected in my research in how people go about forming families, and how friendship factors into kin-making. How are people labelling and qualifying those who are not related by blood or marriage as family members? What systems are in place to uphold and honor those relationships? In terms of China, a society deeply rooted in Confusious values of lineage and ancestor veneration, I'm interested in how those who either choose not to or are unable to produce progengy of their own go about creating legacy through their non-kin relations.
SINGLEHOOD
Like my other topics of interests, my interest in singlehood also comes from my own experience as a single (never-married) women in her late 30s. Building off of the burgeoning subfield of single studies, my research, like my interest in queering categories of kinship, examines how those who forge non-normative life courses by never marrying, create life paths that do not include many of the standard mile-markers of marriage, childbirth, and becoming grandparents, expected in most societies. While much of the research in this field focuses either on women, or men who are in a stage of waithood, my research focuses on men who have yet to marry, or may never marry either out of choice or due to constraints outside of their control.