Episode 10: Michelle Obama’s “Secret Identity”
Why is the same conspiracy theory that targeted Michelle Obama a decade ago now spreading to all celebrities (and First Ladies)? Enter “transvestigation”—a brain-rot conspiracy genre trafficking in wonky eyes, bad photoshops and a gender-inclusive Illuminati. Digital researcher Lexi Webster unravels the nonsense and why it’s worth understanding, while political scholar Fran Amery connects the dots to organized transphobia and not all radical feminism.
Read the transcript.
guests:
Lexi Webster is the Deputy Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. Her primary disciplinary background is in linguistics, but Lexi’s expertise is more comfortably positioned at its interdisciplinary intersections with sociology, gender/sexuality studies and critical media analysis. Lexi’s research has primarily focused on discursive antagonism surrounding transgender socio-legal recognition, including its mediatization offline and politicization offline. Among many peer-reviewed articles in major international journals, Lexi is the author of the forthcoming monograph Tweeting While Trans (Cambridge University Press) and editor of the forthcoming collection Transgender Discourses: Identities, Politics, and Practices (Routledge).
Dr. Fran Amery is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. Her research addresses contemporary struggles around gender and LGBTQ+ equality, in particular organised transphobia and the ‘gender-critical’ movement in the UK. She is also currently researching menstrual justice and injustice globally in the context of activism, politics and policy. She is the author of Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain.
sources:
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Amery, Fran and Mondon, Aurelien. Othering, peaking, populism and moral panics: The reactionary strategies of organised transphobia - Fran Amery, Aurelien Mondon. Sociological Review. 16 Apr, 2024.
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