My research centers on girls’ and femmes’ friendships and collaborative cultural productions as sites of transformation and resistance. My manuscript, Rock and Roll Finishing School: Sixties Girl Groups and Urban Black Northern Girlhood in Mid-Century America, locates the origins of the sixties girl group phenomenon, which included popular groups like the Ronettes, the Supremes, the Crystals, and the Marvelettes, in the youth culture Black girls created for themselves in public housing facilities, integrated public and private schools, and commercial youth-oriented music sites such as talent shows, sock hops, and revues outside of the American South. My work also extends to contemporary Afro-Asian collaborations, exemplified by hip-hop artist Saweetie’s “pretty bitch music,” which draws inspiration from this musical legacy by imagining femme utopias where Black, Asian, and Blasian femmes find joy.

My scholarship highlights the aesthetic and political potential of collaborations among girls and femmes in the visual and sonic worlds they create. My research has been published in Journal of Girlhood Studies, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Feminist Media Histories. In addition, my work on Saweetie and femme fugitivity appears in Rebecca Kumar and Seulghee Lee’s Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2024).

I extend my scholarship through digital video and curatorial practice, treating public programming as a political and pedagogical space for feminist collaboration. My short digital video on Sugar Pie De Santo and Etta James, produced for the See Us Unite campaign, explores Afro-Asian cultural solidarities through the lens of Bay Area music history. My curatorial projects, often supported by the College of Humanities and Arts’ Artistic Excellence in Programming Grant, include the retrospective Not Your Model Minority: The Art and Activism of Renee Tajima-Peña (2021), Listen Differently: Black Feminism, Music, and Popular Culture (2022), the Feminist Horror Symposium (2024), and the ongoing Blasian Bay Archive and Interactive Mapping Project (2025). Across these projects, I explore how femme of color aesthetics and collaborative cultural practices, whether in sixties girl group harmonies or fugitive femme spaces in the Blasian Bay Area, create promiscuous cross-racial spaces of imagination, care, and resistance.

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