AJ JonesCohort 2017

Informed by medical and psychological anthropology, feminist and queer theory, disability studies, and performance ethnography, my research broadly investigates the intersubjective ways individuals embody meaning in light of often-contradictory American cultural expectations of bodies. My dissertation project, "Performing the Missing X: Gender, Disability, and Ambivalent Identity Politics in the United States," explores the experiences of those with Turner Syndrome—a genetic condition in which individuals are born with a partially or entirely missing X chromosome in some or all of their cells. As they experience infertility, disruptions to pubertal development, short stature, and nonverbal learning disability (NVLD), I am interested in how those with Turner Syndrome express their sex, gender, and disability identities, form community, and participate in activist endeavors. Advocacy and accessibility motivate my academic and public scholarship, for which I collaborate with my interlocutors and nonprofits to write, perform, and discuss educational theaterical works about experiences with Turner Syndrome. I am committed to an activist anthropology that embraces aesthetic engagement as an ethical way to learn with our interlocutors and incorporate their goals for our shared research encounter. My work therefore seeks to challenge the cultural narratives that reduce identity to narrow categorizations and, in its place, facilitate more radical forms of human connection.

Advisor: Dr. Ozawa-de Silva