In this essay, I will…
A note about these essays
Originally, this began as one deck about TikTok, a fun little personal project because I thought it was an incredibly pure case study of Gen Z meme culture, and I find most research extraordinarily boring. But a couple of people asked if I was going to make another one, and so I set out to make decks to answer all of the questions that were always floating around in my mind. People often underestimate pop culture, but to me it’s one of the most fascinating things about human nature—how we develop these shared cultural references and how they reflect our present obsessions and anxieties. The purpose of these projects is twofold: to investigate the roots of pop culture through an academic lens, and to make academic writing more accessible.
This has led me to discover my passion for public intellectual and media literacy work, or public-facing education around how to understand and interpret cultural phenomena. I’ve been trying to find ways to apply my strategy work to a social good cause outside of just advertising, and as a former English major fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of human behavior, I’ve found that conducting independent research and analysis of pop culture and sharing my findings is a useful way of doing so.
If you’re interested in hiring me for research or a presentation, you can contact me here!
Hot tip: My notes are in the comments section of each deck, so click the three dots and select “open speaker notes” to view them
Is your teen texting about this?
How TikTok Explains Gen Z Culture & Communication
Are you bored in quarantine and on TikTok? Are you confused and overwhelmed by trends nowadays? Are you intimidated by teen speak? Have you ever felt victimized by “ok boomer”? Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that strategists do all day? Then this deck is #foryou. Everything you need to know about TikTok and its relationship with Gen Z (memes, culture, socioeconomic trends), from a strategist’s perspective—what it is, where it came from, why it’s popular, and why that matters.
“[like] a fun Cosmo article but with SAGE Journal info.”
WAP: Women Asserting Power
The Cultural Significance of Overt Female Sexuality in American Music
*NSFW* Did I purchase an OnlyFans membership for a month for the express purpose of watching Cardi B’s behind-the-scenes content for this music video? Yes. Was it worth it? 100%. The latest in my series of Things No One Asked For (and a follow-up to that TikTok deck) is an exploration of sexuality and power dynamics in music as it relates to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”: the contextual significance of explicitness in rap music, the history of the word “pussy” in pop culture, the notability of French aristocratic design and Britney Spears’ influence on the video’s aesthetic, and how “WAP” represents the unapologetic reclamation of sexual agency and an alternate social hierarchy in which Black women are the reigning class.
For a behind-the-scenes look at how this deck was created, check out my episode of Mark Pollard’s Sweathead podcast, “Taking Stances”!
What We Owe to Each Other and the Practical Value of Empathy
Lessons from The Good Place on Morality in a Pandemic
On existential angst and the primal ache, or alternatively, a TL;DR of a bunch of philosophy books, articles, and treatises for you to drop into casual conversation. As this hellscape of a year comes to a close, I’m fascinated by the evolving ethical implications of living in a society in the midst of COVID-19, and the necessity of morality in a pandemic. My third and final deck of the year is an investigation into what “patriotism” means from a philosophical perspective: how the cult of American individualism informs our ideas of moral obligation and social contracts (come for the philosophy, stay for the scattered musings on Survivor), using the wisdom of the sitcom The Good Place. But the ultimate question is: What do we owe to our fellow human beings?
Out of Office
An Investigation of Memes, Meaning, and Linguistic Competence Online and IRL
This project combines two topics I’m pretty much always thinking about—the nuances of language/communication and how meme culture reflects evolving societal norms—and is the product of six months(!) of work. I am deeply indebted to the internet, not only for providing endless entertainment and the basis for most of my research, but also for allowing me to connect with brilliant people like Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, who reached out last year and despite us never having met in person, has become such a strong creative and academic complement to me, and somehow managed to do all of this while completing a PhD in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (the dream!) at Duke University. A collaboration felt written in the stars for us, and I’m so happy with the way this turned out. Special thanks also to the incredible Matt Klein for his valuable insight and for being our official guest editor/meme consultant on this project 💁🏻♀️ (if you haven't subscribed to his excellent newsletter on cultural trends + cyberpsych, you should absolutely do so here)
Because of this deck, my co-author Anastasia and I were asked to speak at the incredibly cool “The Meme in the Moment” Festival, presented by Digital Void, where we discussed linguistic competence in meme construction and interpretation, and the practice of memeing responsibly, alongside Dr. Jamie Cohen, a pioneer in the field of memetics; Kalhan Rosenblatt of NBC; Rebecca Jennings of Vox; and Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day. It was an incredible honor to have our work not only cited as seminal literature within the discipline (memetics is a very new field, only seven or eight years old!), but it was also extremely gratifying that a lot of people responded to our research—a woman messaged me to tell me that our deck had helped her straitlaced 65-year-old lawyer father understand memes and that he’d sent his very first one to their family group text, some kind soul put our presentation on Heystacks where it was featured in the “Hall of Fame” for June, and Jamie informed us that he was sharing our deck with his students to teach them about memes and semiotics.
If you missed the event, you can catch a recording of our talk here.
Escape from the Wasteland
The Broken Promises of Utopia and the Relentlessly Optimistic Nihilism of Mad Max: Fury Road
I’ve thought a lot about optimistic nihilism lately, and about what it looks like in practice, which led me back to the wasteland of Mad Max: Fury Road. This deck began as an excuse to watch one of my favorite movies a million times, but I was also curious about how far off we are from the utopia and/or dystopia sold to us by fiction and pop culture, given our simultaneous epidemiological, social, political, environmental, and moral crises. I argue that the universe of Mad Max: Fury Road provides an excellent framework for both surviving the apocalypse and moving forward after an event of total collapse.
Digital Void kindly asked me back to present a version of this deck at its “Memes and the Metaverse of Madness” Festival, and so I gave a talk called “Death of Reality,” which cautioned against blind bullishness toward new tech like cryptocurrency and the metaverse without considering their fundamentally exclusive nature.
Photos by Jason Figueredo
You can watch my talk here!
The Bimbo Renaissance
The Weaponized Performance of Hyperfemininity
“Bimbo feminism” has seen a meteoric rise in recent years, exemplified by last summer’s Barbiemania, but it’s part of a much larger, very visible effort to reconcile feminism and femininity. And so my first project of 2024 is a very deep dive into bimbo culture, tracing its evolution in the media parallel to public attitudes about feminism, and contextualizing it within the broader pop culture landscape. I argue that the Barbie movie would not have been as successful had the past decade not laid the groundwork for the return to hyperfemininity—the Trump administration, the pandemic, and the recharacterization of female public figures and celebrity media. It’s especially important to be critical of entertainment at a time when media literacy is lacking in cultural discourse and, to be honest, after a couple of very difficult years, it’s tempting to revert to complacency. But universal liberation is a worthwhile pursuit, and from a cultural theory standpoint, I promise that it’s all connected.