æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, PhD, MFA
æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil’s research asks how images cut the world into being. Working across Black queer and trans studies, Black feminist theory, film theory, and performance studies, her writing examines how visual culture structures the conditions under which race, gender, sexuality, and personhood can appear, circulate, and be known. Attending to cinema, performance, archives, and contemporary art, her work explores how aesthetic practices expose the historical forces that shape the visibility and intelligibility of Black and trans life.
Her current book project, Staging the Cut: On Black Trans Flesh, Adaptive Ruin, and the Call of the Void, investigates how film, performance, archival practice, and emerging visual technologies shape the conditions under which Black and trans life becomes visible, legible, or disavowed. Drawing on cinema studies, Black feminist thought, and trans studies, the book examines how artists and filmmakers work with documentary form, performance, archival fragments, and experimental media to confront the racial and gendered infrastructures embedded in visual culture. Moving between early documentary and narrative cinema, theatre and performance archives, medical and visual taxonomies of sex and race, and contemporary experimental film and digital art, Staging the Cut traces how representational systems repeatedly adapt older logics of surveillance, classification, and spectacle even as they claim to produce new forms of recognition.
Through close readings of film, performance, and contemporary art alongside archival research, the project argues that the “cut”—as an aesthetic gesture, a technological operation, and a social procedure—structures how bodies are rendered intelligible within modern visual regimes. In doing so, the book intervenes in debates across cinema and media studies, Black studies, and transgender studies by questioning liberal frameworks of visibility, representation, and inclusion that presume recognition alone can resolve the violences embedded in systems of classification. Staging the Cut instead foregrounds Black trans flesh as a critical vantage point from which to understand how visual media continuously remake the boundaries of the human.
Publications
Inside “My [Master’s] House”: Racialism’s Renaissance and the Cultural Terror of the Black Femme Celeb Aesthete (2026)
Women & Performance:
a journal of feminist theory
READ
A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory - Roundtable w/ Erique Zhang, Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover, Ava L.J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley (2023)
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
READ
Figuring the Angry Inch:
Transnormativity, the Black Femme, and the Fraudulent Phallus; or Fleshly Remainders of the ‘Ungendered’ and the ‘Unthought’ (2018)
Feminist Theory
READ
© æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil — 2026 — all rights reserved.