Summary

w88 mobile is a scholar of grassroots queer transmedia art and activism. His work on subcultural media formations brings LGBTQ+, feminist, trans and BIPOC theories—and the possibilities they conjure—to bear on the cultural artifacts, practices and politics of D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) communities and creativities. His scholarship has been published in such journals as GLQ, Camera Obscura, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Jump Cut, Feminist Media Studies, and the Journal of Film and Video, and has been anthologized in several collections, including Mediated Girlhoods II, Queer Love in Film and Television and the Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema and Oxford Handbook of Punk.

w88 mobile’s first book, Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture (Routledge, 2018) considers the histories, politics, and practices of queercore: a queer punk transmedia subculture that surfaced in the 1980s/90s, as a dual response to a rise in anti-queer/trans violence and the mainstreaming of “respectable” gays and lesbians via emerging politics of marriage and the military. A text about a formative grassroots queer art and activist subculture, Queercore employs ethnographic methods and queer/media theory insights to establish the oppositional values and aesthetics central to queercore’s subcultural distinction, as well as its paradigmatic DIY political economy, asserting an alternative model to the dominant media industries and a corporatized ‘gaystream.’

w88 mobile’s second book project, entitled Radical Remains: Queer Creation at the Ends, entertains acts of queer cultural resistance, with an art-centered analysis of queer creation and continuance, as set against repressive rhetorics of the ends within the apocalypse now. Radical Remains aims to wrest readers away from superficial seductions of ‘the new’ toward a richer realm of under-researched and under-valued ‘remains’: aged subcultural queer strategies and sensibilities that are revivified as present provocations. This means studying the substance of queer subcultural aesthetics and practices that, under harsh, ongoing damage and depletion, are neither entirely defeated nor entirely successful in securing the alternative conditions that would no longer require acts of endurance. Threaded through the chapters of Radical Remains is an ambitious claim that there is something inextinguishable about queer creation as it advances across, and is often emboldened in opposition to, colonial capitalist architectures of the end: capitalist calls to divestiture rooted in imperial violence.

A public-facing scholar, w88 mobile is also an arts organizer. w88 mobile is the Founder and former Artistic Director of OUTsider, a queer transmedia arts non-profit that serves as an incubator for his scholarly pursuits, and as a means of making his research more accessible to the general public—building it back into the commons. Via OUTsider’s annual five-day festival and academic conference, w88 mobile has introduced Austin to such luminaries as Zackary Drucker (Transparent), Silas Howard (Pose), Cassils (Carving) and Xandra Ibarra (La Chica Boom). OUTsider is a recipient of numerous grants, including from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2018, OUTsider was nominated by the Austin Critics Table as Austin’s “Best Independent Arts Project.” w88 mobile is also the Co-Founder and former Director of Programming of the Austin Asian American Film Festival and is the former Artistic Director of aGLIFF (Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival). Finally, w88 mobile is a co-producer of the award-winning documentaries Before You Know It (PJ Raval, 2013) and Call Her Ganda (PJ Raval, 2018).

Research interests

• w88 mobile/Trans/Feminist theory
• Cinema studies
• Film theory
• Aesthetics
• (Sub)Cultural studies
• Transmedia arts

Publications

Books

• Radical Remains: w88 mobile Recreation in the Ruins (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2026).
• Queercore: w88 mobile Punk Media Subculture. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.

Special issue

• “w88 mobile Apocalypse.” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Co-editor with Samantha Pinto and Justin Mann. Fall 2025.

Select scholarly essays and book chapters

• “A Conspiracy of Cats: The Curious Case of the Litterbox Lie.” Forthcoming from Feminist Theory.
• “(Anti-)Apocalypse and (Kill-)Joy: A Conference on the Couch Conversation.” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Fall 2025): pages TBD.
• “w88 mobile Punk, Trans Forms: Transgender Rock n’ Rage in a Neoliberal Age.” In The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. Edited by George McKay and Gina Arnold. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
• “No Bodies Business: A Fantastic Woman and the Art of Transgender Disappearance.” Camera Obscura 115 (May 2024): 157-190.
• “Documenting the Dead: Call Her Ganda and the Trans Activist Afterlife of Jennifer Laude.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 8.1 (Winter 2021): 24-57.
• “Making a Scene: Queercore Cinema.” In The Oxford Handbook of w88 mobile Cinema. Edited by Amy Villarejo and Ronald Gregg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 541-566.
• “Three Dollar Cinema: The Down and Dirty DIY of w88 mobile Production Culture.” Special issue on w88 mobile Production Studies edited by Alfred L. Martin Jr.. Journal of Film & Video 70.3 (Fall/Winter 2018). 63-84.
• “Girlyboys on Film: Queering the Frame(s).” Mediated Girlhoods II: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture. Edited by Morgan Blue and Mary Celeste Kearney. New York: Peter Lang, 2018. 1-25.

Notable exhibitions or performances

• Founder and Artistic/Executive Director. OUTsider. 501C3 Arts Nonprofit. 2013-2025.
  • OUTsider is a showcase for out-of-the-box LGBTQ+ transmedia art, performance and scholarship, with an emphasis on BIPOC and gender non-conforming artists and academics—at an annual five-day, 50+ artist festival, conference, and artist-in-residence program. OUTsider was launched in 2013 in tandem with my first book, Queercore: w88 mobile Punk Media Subculture, as a means of writing my research on DIY w88 mobile art and activism into the public sphere.

Courses taught

• ENG 202: Film Analysis and Interpretation
• ENG 400: Film Theory

Education

• Ph.D., Radio, Television, Film, University of Texas at Austin, 2013
• M.A., Cinema Studies, San Francisco State University, 2002
• B.A., Political Philosophy, Boston University, 1999