Lore/tta Lemaster
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 258850 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Lore/tta Lemaster |
| PRENOMES | Lore/tta |
| SOBRENOME | Lemaster |
| ASSINATURA | LEMASTER L T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8378-5821 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 54 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Worldbuilding, otherwise, together
Un/learning grading
This collaborative autie-ethnography deliberately centers labor—in and beyond the classroom—to call for coalitional theorizations of teaching that labor toward our collective survival and wellness from the perspective of neurodivergent thinking, writing, and worlding critical communication pedagogy (CCP), otherwise. The current study interrogates institutional impulses to act in accordance with organizational norms and often against our political…
Transgender Worker Communication
This critical qualitative study interrogates the (im)possibility of trans centered justice across work contexts. Communication scholarship tends to overlook the specificity of workplace inequities as they impact transgender workers, revealing a disciplinary lens of misrecognition. The scant research that does address trans difference and work tends to share an ontological orientation that has yet to account for the complexity of trans labor beyon…
Recollecting Care
This autoethnography critically reflects on receiving and providing care in late capitalism, trans modes of relational world-building, and cross-racial and working-class solidarities in the face of structural denial all the while grieving. It is as much about providing care as it is grappling with receiving the same. It is also a study about recovery and repair within a commune of world makers; about pressing in, not on, and learning to love othe…
The Space of In-Betweenness
This essay engages the idea of “incommensurability” as a reflexive attunement to recognizing cultural differences as simultaneously non-equivalent and non-hierarchical. Specifically, we approach incommensurability as a response to commensurability, which we understand as a difference-as-problem assumption undergirding colonial modes of thinking within/beyond intercultural communication inquiry. By reviewing several frameworks that inform a politi…
What Does It Mean to Be Queer in This Moment
After fifty years (or so) of Gay Liberation, several rights seemed enshrined. Marriage was once considered impossible, yet we have lived with marriage equality since 2001 (in the Netherlands). Now thirty-eight countries recognize same-sex marriage as the same as heterosexual marriage. GLTBQ identity has been considered a protected class for over 100 years in some countries. Since the 1970s, homosexuality has not been considered a mental illness i…
Introduction to Part 1
Transing Trump’s moral crusade against transgender people
The beginning of Trump’s second presidency finds us immersed in a moral crusade with the expressed intent of complete annihilation of transness from public life. We argue that this moment requires revolutionary visions for enacting radical political coalitions that center our most vulnerable community members. We consider two media texts across time: (1) a 2024 political ad titled “Nonsense” paid for by the Trump campaign; and (2) Sylvia Rivera’s…
Introduction
Meditations on the Space Between
The Violence of Allonormativity in Communication Studies
Transnational Feminist Solidarities against Empire
Memo
Queer worlds change, disrupt, grow, die and renew. From the first inkling that we don't belong, we find and build families, communities, and homes for our queer selves with each other. Education and advanced degrees never completely protect from homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or classism. For this article, we have purposely blurred the I in our autoethnographic explorations as means of demonstrating collectivity.What can a jour…
Against Carceral Feminisms, Toward Abolitionist Futures
Introduction
Storying the Gender Binary in Sport
This study utilized a two-tiered, thematic and structural narrative analysis to understand the ways transgender, gender non-conforming (TGNC) athletes story their experiences of sport. All participants ( N = 20) self-identified as TGNC and as athletes. A thematic narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed several convergent narratives (i.e., gender sanctioning, binary gender survival, gender transition and disclosure, and gender af…
Collaborative performances of and toward survival in the communication classroom and beyond
This forum features collaborative performances comprised of graduate student and faculty contingencies representing various institutions: University of Kansas, Arizona State University, University of South Florida, and University of Denver. Drawing on lived experience through the vantage of instructor and/or of student, participants embody performances of survival in the communication classroom and beyond. In particular, participants draw on perf…
Inner monologues of a newbie CCPer
Our identities as critical educators are at odds with the hierarchy performatively enforcing the banking model of education. We understand the classroom as a political site where we labor to envision and perform anti-oppression communication. This pedagogical labor reflexively and necessarily unravels students at the edge of their/our intersectional privileges and disadvantages. In this piece, we use performance to reflexively interrogate and dev…
Crafting a Critical Pedagogical Landscape in a Post- Roe Dystopia
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Podcast transcripts were slightly edited to allow ease of reading comprehension
Anti-Terf
After Roe
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court effectively repealed Roe v. Wade and with it federal protections for performing or accessing reproductive healthcare including abortion. In turn, states are charged with determining how they will individually regulate reproductive healthcare leaving individuals with mixed messaging near and far. The result is a patchwork of legal parameters regulating reproductive healthcare to va…
Trans Relational Ambivalences
This study explores ways trans and gender-nonconforming athletes navigate a sense of relational (un)belonging in sport contexts. Our research reveals dialectic movements between feelings of inclusion/exclusion juxtaposed with the structural being of inclusion/exclusion. More specifically, the feeling of inclusion/exclusion gestures to individual sensed experiences of (un)belonging, while the being of inclusion/exclusion anchors a participant’s in…
Ally as an Emerging Critical Orientation
This essay begins with the assumption that "allies" can be and do more than that which is normatively pre-determined by institutionalized definitions of "allies." As a result, this essay implicates ally subjectivity in relational terms. Specifically, we turn to developments in queer relationality to reconceptualize of "ally" beyond the narrow confines binaristic mimesis demands. We argue normative framings of "ally" as an exclusively cisheterosex…
Interrogating “the end,” becoming “the end”
For those of us for whom end times are marked by our arrivals, rhetorical threats of “the end” serve as discursive grounds out of which material experiences are animated. In our current hellscape, queer and trans folks are marked as cultural monstrosities across public and political discourses. Moved by the essays constituting this themed issue, I proffer a response by turning to the ways rhetorics of “the end” and of “end times” are projected on…
Phantasms in the Halls
Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible, is a mediated live performance presented synchronously on Zoom and in person. In this devised ensemble piece, the performers offer a performative response to recent scholarship on the settler colonial university and its significance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work weaves together theories of fugitivity, spectrality, and refusal to offer contextually situated critiques of labo…
Unlearning cisheteronormativity at the intersections of difference
In this essay, five authors use collaged relational autoethnography to explore the relational constitution of non-binary gender subjectivity, resulting in a performance of queer worldmaking. The larger force driving this project includes the unlearning of cisheteronormativity at the intersections of difference. Drawing on the analytic power of “transing” communication, we use collaged relational autoethnography to explore non-binary subjectivity …
Discontents of Being and Becoming Fabulous on RuPaul's Drag U
In this essay, I argue that RuPaul's Drag U reinforces an apparent postfeminist/neoliberal worldview through a rhetoric of “narcissism as liberation,” which inevitably rearticulates classic tropes of patriarchal domination. In particular, I find that Drag U relies on (and promotes) individualization and competition as primary logics that purport to signal liberation in a neoliberal economy. By the end of each episode, contestants are presumed to …
Performing (Asian American trans) femme on RuPaul’s Drag Race
This essay turns to reality television to perform trans of color criticism. Taking as its analytic focus the embodied performance – and concomitant mediated production – of whiteness by Asian American drag queen competitor Gia Gunn on the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race [Bailey, F., Barbato, R., Campbell, T., RuPaul, Corfe, S., Post, P., & Salangsang, M. (Executive Producers). (2012). RuPaul's drag race all stars [TV series]. World …
Trans (gender) trouble
In this essay, we tease out and implicate what we term the queer (cissexist) theoretical imagination suggesting an incommensurability of sorts between that of queer theory and that of trans subjectivity. The incommensurability renders a reductive framing of transness, in cissexist terms, that privilege transgression (often of a superficial sort) of gender over basic trans, transgender, and transsexual survival and wellness. In the end, we encoura…
Notes on Trans Relationality
Research Article| June 01 2017 Notes on Trans Relationality Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster is an intersectionality scholar who locates their disciplinary work at the intersections of rhetoric, performance studies, and critical intercultural communication. Their work can be found in Women’s Studies in Communication, Qualitative Inquiry, and Liminalities. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLB…
Telling Multiracial Tales
What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one "side" of the family over another, I experiment with a con…
Queer Imag(in)ing
This essay explores queer imag(in)ing by analyzing a contemporary vampire text, Let The Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist. As I argue, the rhetorical act of humanizing vampires is inherently limiting for (queer) audiences and indicative of processes that seek to clarify, assimilate, and tame-in short, normalize, which as Michel Foucault states "imposes homogeneity" by stamping out difference. Furthermore, I argue that a text can actively res…
Ally as an Emerging Critical Orientation
This essay begins with the assumption that "allies" can be and do more than that which is normatively pre-determined by institutionalized definitions of "allies." As a result, this essay implicates ally subjectivity in relational terms. Specifically, we turn to developments in queer relationality to reconceptualize of "ally" beyond the narrow confines binaristic mimesis demands. We argue normative framings of "ally" as an exclusively cisheterosex…
Suicidal
Content warning: This relational meditation centers suicidality including suicidal talk (as well as talk by currently suicidal people) and suicidal ideation. Dear reader, approach this piece with compassion and care. Seek the support and care you require-ideally on your terms and in a community of care. In this relational meditation, I offer a performative response to Alexander Baril's (2020) 'suicidal manifesto' in the hopes of 'building relatio…
Transing Trump’s moral crusade against transgender people
The beginning of Trump’s second presidency finds us immersed in a moral crusade with the expressed intent of complete annihilation of transness from public life. We argue that this moment requires revolutionary visions for enacting radical political coalitions that center our most vulnerable community members. We consider two media texts across time: (1) a 2024 political ad titled “Nonsense” paid for by the Trump campaign; and (2) Sylvia Rivera’s…
The Violence of Allonormativity in Communication Studies
Against Carceral Feminisms, Toward Abolitionist Futures
Collaborative performances of and toward survival in the communication classroom and beyond
This forum features collaborative performances comprised of graduate student and faculty contingencies representing various institutions: University of Kansas, Arizona State University, University of South Florida, and University of Denver. Drawing on lived experience through the vantage of instructor and/or of student, participants embody performances of survival in the communication classroom and beyond. In particular, participants draw on perf…
Anti-Terf
Queer Imag(in)ing
This essay explores queer imag(in)ing by analyzing a contemporary vampire text, Let The Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist. As I argue, the rhetorical act of humanizing vampires is inherently limiting for (queer) audiences and indicative of processes that seek to clarify, assimilate, and tame-in short, normalize, which as Michel Foucault states "imposes homogeneity" by stamping out difference. Furthermore, I argue that a text can actively res…
Relationally Out
Research Article| February 01 2014 Relationally Out: A Case For and Against the Closet Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster (MA, California State University, Long Beach) is a doctoral student in the department of speech communication at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Benny’s research is located at the intersections of critical intercultural communication and performance studies where s/he works with puppets, queer theory, tra…
Telling Multiracial Tales
What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one "side" of the family over another, I experiment with a con…
On Strike! A Poetic Autoethnography of Labor
During my first semester of doctoral study, our faculty union went on strike. The administration successfully negotiated with the other unions (service employees, non-tenure-track faculty, and graduate assistants) at the last minute (3 a.m. on the day that strikes were slated to begin). As a result, I not only taught my classes and completed my assignments, but also stood and sat and paced in solidarity with my striking faculty. This poetic autoe…
Discontents of Being and Becoming Fabulous on RuPaul's Drag U
In this essay, I argue that RuPaul's Drag U reinforces an apparent postfeminist/neoliberal worldview through a rhetoric of “narcissism as liberation,” which inevitably rearticulates classic tropes of patriarchal domination. In particular, I find that Drag U relies on (and promotes) individualization and competition as primary logics that purport to signal liberation in a neoliberal economy. By the end of each episode, contestants are presumed to …
Monstrosity, performance, and race in contemporary culture
When I was young, I was warned of monstrous encounters. When I was young, I was told tales of monsters taking little kids, monsters touching neighbors, monsters breaking into homes, stealing, rapin
Notes on Trans Relationality
Research Article| June 01 2017 Notes on Trans Relationality Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster is an intersectionality scholar who locates their disciplinary work at the intersections of rhetoric, performance studies, and critical intercultural communication. Their work can be found in Women’s Studies in Communication, Qualitative Inquiry, and Liminalities. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLB…
Unlearning the Violence of the Normative
Research Article| June 01 2017 Unlearning the Violence of the Normative Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster is adjunct professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach. They are interested in the mundane performance of culture, non-normative modes of cultural intervention, and intersectional rhetorics. They would like to thank the forum editors for their labor in piecing together this powerfu…
Passing, Again
“Passing, Again” performs a generative autobiographic poetic response to Imani Cezanne's poem “#flyingwhileblack.” Bryant Keith Alexander's framing of generative autobiography and Sheila Stewart's articulation of poetic inquiry provide the conceptual frameworks that guide the crafting of this critical and creative response. “Passing, Again” is thus intertextual in that it derives its form from Cezanne's just as it is metatextual as a standalone p…
An Ode to Incoherent Canons
In this collaborative response, we write and perform against the hegemony of academic canons. We draw on embodied, performative, and poetic means to interrogate canonical prejudice, canonical domination, and canonical exception as they emerge in and are adjacent to our own academic careers. In so doing, we seek to disrupt normative modes of knowledge production and argue for a futurity that is incoherent. And it should be—to the existing structur…
Unlearning cisheteronormativity at the intersections of difference
In this essay, five authors use collaged relational autoethnography to explore the relational constitution of non-binary gender subjectivity, resulting in a performance of queer worldmaking. The larger force driving this project includes the unlearning of cisheteronormativity at the intersections of difference. Drawing on the analytic power of “transing” communication, we use collaged relational autoethnography to explore non-binary subjectivity …
Queering communication studies
Genders and sexualities continue to remain underexplored in the field of communication studies and the academy in general. This essay examines possibilities for incorporating queer perspectives into communication studies. At the invitation of the Journal of Applied Communication Research editor, 9 communication scholars who use queer theory or queer perspectives in their own work responded to a series of questions addressing how queer theory and …
Notes on Some Especially (Not So) Subtle Dissatisfactions
Research Article| February 01 2020 Notes on Some Especially (Not So) Subtle Dissatisfactions Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster Benny LeMaster (PhD, Southern Illinois University Carbondale) is assistant professor of critical/cultural communication studies in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. They study the discursive, material, and performative constitution of cultural difference at the intersections of rhetoric…
Refusing a compulsory want for revenge, or, teaching against retributive justice with liberatory pedagogy
Retributive justice serves as a punitive foundation on which Western education is organized. It relies on paternalistic notions of moral goodness with the teacher embodying moral perfection and academe serving as the “neutral” ground on which a student learns to be a “moral” actor. In turn, students of marginalized intersectional difference “pay” for their incapacity to perform correctly. We reject retributive impulses as violent enactments of po…
Critical performative pedagogical encounters, or “Let’s try that again. But first, let’s breathe”
Informed by Pineau’s (2002) critical performative pedagogy and Reverend James Lawson’s (1985) Civil Rights era nonviolent workshops, we introduce to the Communication Education readership a pedagog
(De)Composing Ecological Futurities
Research Article| February 01 2021 (De)Composing Ecological Futurities: Insurgent Worldmaking at the End of a World The Cacophiliacs; The Cacophiliacs The Cacophiliacs include a number of revolving contributors including, for this writing, and in alphabetical order Angela Labador, Lore/tta LeMaster, Tyler Rife, B. Liahnna Stanley, Megan Stephenson, and Ana Isabel Terminel Iberri. All contributing authors claim full authorship over this collaborat…
Performing (Asian American trans) femme on RuPaul’s Drag Race
This essay turns to reality television to perform trans of color criticism. Taking as its analytic focus the embodied performance – and concomitant mediated production – of whiteness by Asian American drag queen competitor Gia Gunn on the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race [Bailey, F., Barbato, R., Campbell, T., RuPaul, Corfe, S., Post, P., & Salangsang, M. (Executive Producers). (2012). RuPaul's drag race all stars [TV series]. World …
Speculative fiction, criticality, and futurity
This short essay introduces the reader to the special issue, Speculative Fiction, Criticality, Futurity, featuring original short speculative fiction, flash fiction, graphic novels, and visual art–each of which critically imagines liberatory futurities. Each submission contributes to a different component of futuristic world-making. Some of the pieces tend to the messy fight against neo-fascism by speaking to the various tactics to dismantle supr…
Trans (gender) trouble
In this essay, we tease out and implicate what we term the queer (cissexist) theoretical imagination suggesting an incommensurability of sorts between that of queer theory and that of trans subjectivity. The incommensurability renders a reductive framing of transness, in cissexist terms, that privilege transgression (often of a superficial sort) of gender over basic trans, transgender, and transsexual survival and wellness. In the end, we encoura…
Interrogating “the end,” becoming “the end”
For those of us for whom end times are marked by our arrivals, rhetorical threats of “the end” serve as discursive grounds out of which material experiences are animated. In our current hellscape, queer and trans folks are marked as cultural monstrosities across public and political discourses. Moved by the essays constituting this themed issue, I proffer a response by turning to the ways rhetorics of “the end” and of “end times” are projected on…
Phantasms in the Halls
Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible, is a mediated live performance presented synchronously on Zoom and in person. In this devised ensemble piece, the performers offer a performative response to recent scholarship on the settler colonial university and its significance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work weaves together theories of fugitivity, spectrality, and refusal to offer contextually situated critiques of labo…
Against the grain
This agenda-setting theory essay offers a collaborative response to Sprague, J. (1992). Expanding the research agenda for instructional communication: Raising some unasked questions. Communication Education, 41(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529209378867 early theorizing on critical approaches to communication pedagogy, developing it to account not only for critical developments since but also to the political precarity increasingly organ…
Suicidal
Content warning: This relational meditation centers suicidality including suicidal talk (as well as talk by currently suicidal people) and suicidal ideation. Dear reader, approach this piece with compassion and care. Seek the support and care you require-ideally on your terms and in a community of care. In this relational meditation, I offer a performative response to Alexander Baril's (2020) 'suicidal manifesto' in the hopes of 'building relatio…
Storying the Gender Binary in Sport
This study utilized a two-tiered, thematic and structural narrative analysis to understand the ways transgender, gender non-conforming (TGNC) athletes story their experiences of sport. All participants ( N = 20) self-identified as TGNC and as athletes. A thematic narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed several convergent narratives (i.e., gender sanctioning, binary gender survival, gender transition and disclosure, and gender af…
Collaborative performances of and toward survival in the communication classroom and beyond
This forum features collaborative performances comprised of graduate student and faculty contingencies representing various institutions: University of Kansas, Arizona State University, University of South Florida, and University of Denver. Drawing on lived experience through the vantage of instructor and/or of student, participants embody performances of survival in the communication classroom and beyond. In particular, participants draw on perf…
Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras) · Art (16 obras) · Aesthetics (14 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Queer (12 obras) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (11 obras)