Loretta LeMaster

Lore/tta LeMaster (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) (pronouns: she/they) is an award-winning scholar and artist who engages the intersectional constitution of cultural difference with particular focus on trans and queer of color life, art, and embodiment. Her work braids the social sciences with the humanities in service of liberatory political praxes. Recent research includes critical qualitative investigations into trans life; meta-interrogations of disciplinary complacencies in U.S. settler empire-making; the rhetorical construction of transness in monstrous terms; and performative explorations of sensorial economies.

Their research has been published in academic handbooks, anthologies, encyclopedias, and in a range of academic journals including, for example, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Women's Studies in Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Communication Education. Moreover, she and Amber L. Johnson co-edited the award-winning anthology Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins (Routledge, 2020). Their forthcoming book, Pedagogies of the Enfleshed: Critical Communication Pedagogy Otherwise (Lexington Press) will be published late 2024.

Professor LeMaster lives, loves, and creates on stolen Akimel O'odham (Pima) and Piipaash (Maricopa) land currently called Arizona and where she serves as Associate Professor of Critical/Cultural Communication and Performance Studies in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.