Research

Skills

I’m am expert in qualitative methods: digital and archival research, content and textual data collection and analysis, ethnography including surveys and interviews. I’m also adapt at rapidly learning and synthesizing information, then translating it into simplified written communications from internal reports to award-winning books. I have superb organization skills, including planning and completing multiple projects simultaneously.

Expertise Areas

  • Intersectional feminist studies: critical cultural theory, Black and Ethnic studies, DEI (diversity, equity, & inclusion)
  • Sexuality: queer theory, identity development, historical genders/sexualities, romance
  • Performance and media: digital media, drag, popular entertainment

Projects

Research Project 1: The Book. Theatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller (that’s me) illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending and highlights how, in each case, standard drag discourses do not sufficiently capture the complexity of performers’ intents and methods, nor do they provide a strong enough foundation for holistically evaluating the impact of this work. Queering Drag offers redefinition of the genre centralized in the performer’s construction and presentation of a “queer” version of hegemonic identity, and it models a new set of tools for analyzing drag as a process of intents and methods enacted to effect specific goals. Queering Drag is the winner of the Popular Culture Association’s John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies and was featured on NBC’s “10 LGBTQ books to watch out for in 2020.”

Research Project 2: The Second Book. Digital Drag: Drag Semiotics in Popular Culture is an investigation into how “drag discourse” is used in digital entertainment media (TV, social media, and online news).  I scrutinize how words and ideas associated with certain traditional or specific forms of drag are levied more broadly, often to explain public forms of gender variance. My first inquiry into the use of “drag queen” and other theatrical drag terms to describe highly feminine celebrities has been published in Feminist Media Studies. My second inquiry into how the historically situated drag ball term “realness” has been co-opted by popular media, most notably RuPaul’s Drag Race has been published in Social Semiotics.

Ongoing Research:

  • I’m dabbling in cultural geography by exploring methods of creating a “queer cultural landscape,” or extending identity-based cultural practices in ways that effect the development/organization of a traditional space. My co-authored article on summer camps for LGBTQ and other marginalized youth is published in Social Semiotics.
  • I’m working on a comprehensive data analysis of romance genre themes in popular Young Adult High Fantasy novels. I just completed the grant-supported year long supervision of 7 undergraduate researchers collecting and coding data from 16 books/4 series. This research is intended for the Popular Culture Association annual conference and Journal of Romance Studies.