Christina Bush earned her PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her broad research interests include black masculinity studies, fashion studies, and thing theory, and her current work is animated by an interest in what she terms “the racial life of things.” At the Wolf Humanities Center Christina will be focusing on a manuscript project that examines a set of twentieth century dress objects from across the wardrobe that highlight the importance of the material as well as indexical dimensions of clothing to articulations of abstractions like Blackness, masculinity, and subjectivity. Before coming to Penn Christina was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Christina Bush
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities
2018—2019 Forum on Stuff
Christina Bush
African American Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
University of California - Berkeley, 2017
Fit: Fashioning the Black Masculine
Fit: Fashioning the Black Masculine argues that clothing and black masculine subjectivity are fashioned concomitantly across different historical moments, and engages with how the materiality of clothing has worked to both instantiate and efface black masculinity as that which is embodied by an already coherent masculine subject. This work contributes to broader examinations of how dress and clothing have and continue to be sites through which notions of Black citizenship, subjecthood, and humanity, have been fashioned and re-fashioned.