Against marriage
[2023 – present, manuscript in preparation]
In this book, I examine the history of marriage and argue the institution is politically beyond repair in societies that value progressive socialism. I show how, in present neoliberal and neofascist societies, marriage has nonetheless become a means of survival for precarious individuals: it for example helps people secure health insurance and housing. In an attempt to separate the exclusionary material politics of marriage from its emotional politics of care, I excavate elements like tenderness, sentimentality and love as a laborious project. Can we soak off these emotional dispositions from their exclusionary histories and recycle them into the emotional cornerstones for socialist imaginations? I similarly deconstruct practices like the wedding speech and wedding disco, urging readers to integrate these rites in the socialist politics of everyday life.

On the audiences of immoral artists
[2023 – present, research proposal in preparation]
The mythologically masculine figure of the creative genius has often been employed to minimize and excuse violence against marginalized people. In exchange for great art, audiences might be more than willing to look the other way when women, people of color, queer people and children get hurt. With the arrival of social media in the 2000s, the misdeeds of monstrous men have become harder to ignore. Information about artists’ private lives used to be harder to find: biographies were a rarity that had to be actively searched for. Today, the crimes of monstrous artists are all over the internet. For this study, I interview fans of artists who have been deemed politically problematic as people. Taking the assumption that research participants want to present themselves as morally sound people, I trace the discursive constructions they use to separate art from artist, but also audience from artist. How do they deal with great art made by horrible people?

Disco culture
[2023 – present]
The 1970s formed an interesting time in popular music. The civil rights movements, women’s movement and gay movement were more visible then ever, and social progress seemed to finally arrive for many marginalized citizens. After a highly politicized moment in American culture, a greater variety of people than ever before now found each other on the dance floors of the newly invented discotheques. In this research project I examine how disco culture organized itself through contradictions. On the one hand, for example, the dance floor was seen as a great equalizer for anyone who wanted to escape politics. On the other hand, specialized discotheques quickly popped up, catering to specific demographics in separatist manners. Although disco culture was meant to encourage a dance floor shaped by a mass of people becoming one, it also formed a moment of increased celebrity production with musicians and DJs alike reveling in glamor. What were the shifting values we can trace on the disco dance floor? In my work on disco culture, I seek to articulate the politics of disco as they took shape in the 1970s, examining them from house parties to Studio 54, from The Loft to Saturday Night Fever, from Casablanca Records to Manu Dibango, all the way 1981, when the social panic around the Aids Crisis came to obstruct any tolerance that had been left for disco’s escapist hedonism.

The celebrity feminist in popular music
[2013-2025]
When Beyoncé claimed feminism as part of her star text, celebrity culture shifted instantly. More and more celebrities came out as feminists, while audiences and media platforms used a feminist lens to argue whether or not they truly were as feminist as they claimed. My research on celebrity feminism in popular music has led to two text-focused Master theses titled “Imagining Beyoncé: A Case Study in Female Superstardom” and “Female Sexuality in Popular Music: A Comparative Analysis of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus”. In 2025, I completed my dissertation in which I combined audience research with textual analysis in order to examine the social function of celebrity. The dissertation, titled “The Celebrity Feminist in Popular Music (2014-2024)”, is currently being reworked into a book manuscript.

Other fields of interest: feminist media studies, cultural studies, critical whiteness studies, popular music studies, celebrity studies, internet studies, sexuality studies, gender studies, women’s studies, queer studies, popular culture studies, affect studies.

For a full overview of my research output, see the publications and CV page on this website. I am open to requests for commissioned assignments in English and Dutch.