Hey, Alexa here.
Welcome.
This website reflects the layers of who I am—as well as the parts still under construction.
For now, I offer, you dear reader, three layers that ground me as a person and a scholar.
Layer 1: Who Raised Me
I’m not only a sociocultural anthropologist. I’m a mother (of a human and a furry non-human), a daughter, a partner, a sister, an aunt and a friend.
I’m deeply grounded in Black feminist and Black queer literature and thought. I have been raised, molded, held, and loved by many Black mothers, aunties, and grandmothers. These women, whether through kinship, books, music, art, or activism, have critically shaped my intellectual process and my way of seeing and being in the world.
Looking for economic stability and reprieve from the Jim Crow south in the mid-1950s my grandmother Lily Bell Radford packed her bags and boarded a greyhound bus with her niece Etta. The trip from Berneice, Louisiana to Chicago, IL was 797 miles. There she would join the thousands of Black women who would work as domestic laborers caring for white households during the Great Migration, while raising her four children Ann, James, Ella, and Betty Lou (my mother). Although Lily Bell found some reprieve from the overt racism encountered in her hometown of Bernice, she and her children navigated a new terrain of subtle “isms” in the form of housing discrimination and redlining which effects are still present today in the City of Evanston.
Evanston, a suburb, just north of the city, is where I would spend my early childhood years in my mother and grandmother's care. My summers were spent at Fleetwood Community Center, playing double dutch, braiding hair, doing arts and crafts and slurping on jumbo pickles (the ones that come in the bag)…there, at Fleetwood, I received my first education in Blackgirlhood from friends, camp counselors, and cousins. During my teenage years we moved to Atlanta, GA where I would navigate adolescence in a predominantly white suburb where we were one of the first Black families on our street. After leaving Atlanta, I lived in New York City and Pittsburgh, PA. All of these places/spaces, my experiences within them, continue to shape who I am as a person and scholar today.
Layer 2: The "Accidental Anthropologist"
Before returning to higher education as a “non-traditional student” to complete a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh my research questions about blackness, gender, and sexuality in postsocialist spaces began in Brighton Beach, also known as “little Odessa." Located at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment with an older Ukrainian woman, sleeping on a futon in the kitchen (very New York, right?).
My fluency in the Russian language and curiosity about the Former Soviet Union emerged from living in Brighton Beach. Much of my early introduction into the Soviet and post-Soviet world happened in the kitchens and on the benches of this predominantly Russian speaking world, through the stories of basbushki (elderly women) who migrated to the United States in the early 1990s. Intimate conversations with these women, revealed echoes, resonances and dissonances across difference.
These conversations were like small windows into these women’s lives which made me question: In what times, spaces and places do the ideologies that reconstruct Cold War binaries collapse under the weight of connection through difference? How does blackness and anti-blackness function globally, through different modes and registers? Often overlooked, the Black Diaspora and the Soviet and post-Soviet world have had rich and complicated ties. In particular, Central Asia and Black America have been connected longer than most realize. This sense of historical connection during the Soviet period was reignited for me on those benches lining the boardwalk in Brighton Beach and continues to drive my research in Central Asia.
Who knew I was already an anthropologist in training?
Layer 3: The PhD Candidate
In 2020 I began my journey as a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Now a doctoral candidate, my research takes an intersectional approach to think about trans and queer experiences in post-socialist Kyrgyzstan. In my research gender or nation are not static or standalone categories, but appear as ideological and material debris from past imperio-colonial intervention during the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. I argue that these debris are rejuvenated (at particular political moments) and continue to structure the lives of gendered and racialized bodies in present day neoliberal Kyrgyzstan.
My theoretical inquiry accounts for multiple ways of living queerness, transness, and blackness within and beyond LGBTQ+ activism in the region. I ask: What does it mean to negotiate and reimagine ways of living across racial, gendered, religious, and national boundaries?”
Thanks for being here. I hope this page feels like a door into my thoughts…open just enough to invite curiosity and conversation.
Dissertation Description
So what is my dissertation about?
Broadly my research explores what it means to be trans or gender non-conforming in Kyrgyzstan today. In a country where state leaders often use anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric to define “Kyrgyz identity,” people who don’t fit into narrow ideas about gender, sexuality, religion, or nationality often find themselves pushed to the margins.
Over the course of two years of preliminary research fourteen months of which were spent living and working with trans communities in Kyrgyzstan, I observed how trans people navigate these challenges every day. My current dissertation project, Postsocialist Wake: Ethnographies of Trans Life in Kyrgyzstan looks at how rejuvenated material and ideological remains of the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods from the perspective of Kyrgyz trans embodiment in contemporary Kyrgyzstan.
One of the unique parts of my work is that I bring together insights from Black Studies and Central Asian Studies to think about how anti-black logic and imperialism shape ideas of ethnic and national belonging across other categories of difference in Central Asia, a geography where existing literature does not usually inquire about blackness, but where blackness is articulated in different ways. What happens when we look at trans and queer life in Kyrgyzstan through the lens of anti-blackness and blackness? Doing so helps highlight the particular experience of being trans in Kyrgyzstan and how Kyrgyz trans life is conditioned by the pre-Soviet and Soviet past in the neoliberal present.
In short, this project centers the lives of those most often left out of conversations about global anti-blackness and anti-gender discourse. Their stories help us understand the limits of belonging and the possibilities for reimagining community in a changing world.
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