About

I am a professor of anthropology at UCLA. My research focuses on youth, language, migration, politics, and identity. Though my original training is in sociophonetics, I have conducted research among Latina girls involved in gangs, politicians in Town Hall meetings, children in school settings, and young adults playing videogames.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Media studies
• Law
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Kittens, Virgins, and Zygotes

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter considers state and non-state actors’ collective investment in the control of sexuality, and more specifically the idealization of chastity through the promotion of the concepts of kawaii and cute, which are affective categories largely defined through innocence and childishness, and through an implied lack of sexual experience. Two international case studies are presented—one from Japan to understand kawaii and the other from Mexico to understand cute and its emerging analog in Mexico, kiut. The two specific cases shed light on the relationship between affective categories, nation branding, and soft power, as well as the relationship between religion and its investment in the control of reproduction and sexuality. Special attention is paid to semiotic resources (advertising/branding and toys) for the production of childishness and (sexual) innocence.

  PublisherDOI

• FIGHTING WORDS:

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2023-05-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Currents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Uses of innuendo such as enthymemes, sarcasm, and dog whistles by politicians and the resulting interlineal readings available to some listeners gave us an early warning about the type of relationship that has now obtained between Christianity and politics, and specifically the rise of Christian Nationalism as facilitated by President Donald Trump. I argue that two currents of indirectness in American politics, one religious and the other racial, have converged like tributaries leading to a larger body of water.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aesthetics in Styles and Variation: A Fresh Flavor

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2022-06-29 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics ( rasa and “everyday aesthetics”) that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Language, gender, race, politics: how my field and I chose each other and what I learned along the way

  Gender and Language · 2021-03-25 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Sticking It to the Man”: r/wallstreetbets, Generational Masculinity and Revenge <b>in Narratives of our Dystopian Capitalist Age</b> ¹

  Anthropology Now · 2021-01-02 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  (2021). “Sticking It to the Man”: r/wallstreetbets, Generational Masculinity and Revenge in Narratives of our Dystopian Capitalist Age 1. Anthropology Now: Vol. 13, 'Where Do We Go From Here?', pp. 91-99.

  PublisherDOI

• Part I Introduction: “Ask the Gays”: How to Use Language to Fragment and Redefine the Public Sphere

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This section introduction sets the stage for chapters 2, 3, and 4 by surveying some aspects of Trump's speech acts that have precipitated a breakdown of the body politic. For example, Trump's use of the determiner the before human kinds (such as "the gays") pigeonholes and homogenizes the groups in question, rendering them an undifferentiated "other." The chapter also discusses how Trump threatens Habermas' notion of "the public sphere," widely influential in contemporary understandings of the development of Western-style democracy. Trump's divisive linguistic practices threaten the Enlightenment principles behind a Habermasian public sphere in which rational individuals freely participate with others in discussions of common problems, through a common language. The chapter further discusses how Trump hails and enlists his supporters through interactional routines, including entraining them during his campaign rallies with powerful three-syllable chants (such as "Get them out!", "Lock her up!", and "Build that wall!"). Trump also divides the nation by sanctioning insensitivity against his detractors, enacting the role of a stern, even merciless father figure.

  PublisherDOI

• Part II Introduction: The Show Must Go On: Hyperbole and Falsehood in Trump’s Performance

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-08-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This section introduction furnishes an overview of Trump's verbal behavior when it verges on or crosses into falsehood, by way of innuendo, gaslighting, and plausible deniability. It compares the Trump administration's symbolic practices with those of Nazi Germany, including the use of superlatives and hyperbole so extreme it takes on a "fairy tale quality." The chapter further identifies a favorite Trump discourse sequence here termed "reactive reversal," related to the concept of "plausible deniability" discussed in a later chapter. First, Trump stakes out a hyperbolic claim, and if a public outcry follows, Trump reacts by reversing his claim and blaming others for their inference. Then he may triumphantly declare victory over whoever "really" claimed/did what he originally claimed. This is one of Trump's methods of gauging reaction from the public.

  PublisherDOI

• We Latin Americans Know a Messianic Autocrat When We See One

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-08-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter opens by exploring how Trump's self-aggrandizing political masculinization is connected to his racism. As Trump elaborates his identity as a White supremacist strongman, he implies that only he can emasculate brown maculinities through the tools of White ethnonationalism. Trump has also praised and admired despots across the world, preferring the trappings of cold-blooded brutality to the trope of the White civilizer. The chapter goes on to discuss how Latin American leaders have responded discursively to President Trump, as each adopts a particular stance to respond to his supremacist strongman masculinity. The stances of former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, for instance, precipitated anxiety about Trump's political humiliation of Mexico and his gendered humiliation of Peña Nieto. The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has opted for a dignified posture, rebuking Trump while championing the revalorization of indigenity, rurality, and the Mexican common folk. Meanwhile, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, plainly admires and vociferously parrots Trump's white ethnonationalism, echoing almost word for word the text of Trump's campaign speeches. These Latin American leaders thus by turns vilify and emulate Trump's posturing, whether to counter, contain, or amplify the unpredictable power of the elephantine neighbor to the North.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-08-31

  paratextSenior author

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Frequent coauthors

• Janet McIntosh

  Brandeis University

  10 shared

• Stefanie Jannedy

  Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics

  3 shared

• Jack Sidnell

  University of Toronto

  2 shared

• Aomar Boum

  2 shared

• Sylvia Sierra

  Syracuse University

  2 shared

• Brion van Over

  2 shared

• Bruce Mannheim

  University of Iowa

  2 shared

• Deborah Cameron

  University of Oxford

  2 shared

Labs

• Norma Mendoza DentonPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Los Angeles