Alexandra Johnson

Alex works as a part of many feminist spaces including as an office assistant for the National Women’s Studies Association, and as a part of the editorial team for Women’s Studies Quarterly and Feminist Anthropology. Alex is also a co-chair for the Pop Culture Interest group at the NWSA, an inaugural member of the Feminist Press’ Young Feminist Leadership Council, and she runs the annual 16 Stories campaign that features feminist activism.

Alex has a background in media theory and feminist philosophy and works on the analysis of gender and sexuality representation in popular fiction. Her academic aims are to bring feminist philosophy and media/literary theory together in a way that critiques the impact that fictional narratives have on our social and cultural experience. She obtained a BA in Media and Communication from University of Southern Maine, a BA in Philosophy from Purchase College, and an MA in Women and Gender Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Upcoming: 

• Crafting Representation: Deploying Racecrafting Techniques to Critique Gender- and Sexuality-Swapping in HBO’s Lovecraft Country – forthcoming 2022 in Studies of the Fantastic
  • This article engages with feminist and queer theory to understand the failures that came with the swapping of gender and sexuality in the adaptation of Lovecraft Country from page to screen, even amongst the success of the show. Specifically, this article engages with Fields and Fields conceptualization of ‘racecraft’ to identify similar terrain in gender and sexuality.
• Narcissistic Fathers and Powered Daughters – forthcoming 2022 in Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance
  • This chapter is a deep-dive into kinship and the links between the patriarchal figure, the patriarchy system, and the agency of daughters within that system, and how narcissism plays into the roles of family by looking at the ways that the father/daughter relationship plays out in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
• Generative Disruption and Queer Sharing: Accessibility and Community in Graduate Learning during COVID-19 – forthcoming 2022 in Queering Sharing: Toward the Redistribution of Resources around the University
  • This chapter traces a graduate research project at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways that graduate learning was productively changed during the pandemic, and pedagogical lessons that can be learned from the pandemic.