Affiliated Institutions

Purchase College-SUNY

My work mixes methods from the humanities and social sciences. I have a background in artmaking and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. Most of my research and writing is grounded in ethnographic modes of attention and deals with some configuration of issues related to media, technology, gender, sexuality, and race. Much of my work falls broadly under rubrics of affect and political feelings, or the ways our sensed experiences and emotional engagements with the world inform and are subject to politics and other forms of power. But my interest in these forms and practices is resolutely at their seams and fault lines, where things come together, fall apart, are made vulnerable, where new worlds of experience might emerge.

Areas of Research

queer, media/technology, race

Publications

McGlotten, Shaka. Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013

McGlotten, Shaka and Dana-ain Davis, editors. Black Genders and Sexualities. New York: Palgrave, 2012

McGlotten, Shaka. “The Élan Vital of DIY Porn.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (forthcoming 2014).

McGlotten, Shaka. “A Brief and Improper Geography of Queerspaces and Sexpublics in Austin, Texas.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (forthcoming 2014, currently available online).

McGlotten, Shaka and Sarah VanGundy”Zombie Porn 1.0: Or, Some Queer Things Zombie Sex Can Teach Us.” Qui Parle 21 (2013): 101-125.

McGlotten, Shaka and Lisa Jean Moore. “Dry and Limp: Aging Queers, Zombies, and Sexual Reanimation.” Journal of Medical Humanities 34 (2013): 261-268.

McGlotten, Shaka. “Ordinary Intersections: Speculations on Difference, Justice, and Utopia in Black Queer Life.” Transforming Anthropology: The Journal for the Association of Black Anthropologists 20 (2012): 45-66.

Projects

Israel

Political Aesthetics of Drag

A multi sited investigation of artists and activists who use drag in Israel/Palestine, Berlin, and New York City.

Berlin, Germany

Black Data, Deep Web

An effort to bring together black queer studies with network culture studies. The project will include ethnographic work among hackers as well as artists. The project uses the heuristic "black data" to think through black queer cultural practices and epistemologies and how they might matter in the era of big data.

New York, NY, United States

Black Data, Deep Web

An effort to bring together black queer studies with network culture studies. The project will include ethnographic work among hackers as well as artists. The project uses the heuristic "black data" to think through black queer cultural practices and epistemologies and how they might matter in the era of big data.