Getting to Know Your CMNS Faculty: Erique Zhang

Erique Zhang is an assistant professor who recently joined the School of Communication, starting on September 3rd, 2024. Their areas of expertise include fashion and beauty studies, queer of color critique, queer and transgender theory, Asian American studies, feminist media studies, social media influencers, popular media, art and visual culture. Their research examines how images of trans women and femmes of color circulate in the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries and what these images communicate about race, gender, and trans identity.

We caught up with Erique to learn more about the newest professor in our School.

Could you tell us about your academic journey?

I took somewhat of an unconventional route to get to where I am today. I did my undergraduate degree in Studio Art at New York University, where I specialized in fiber arts and fashion as art. Since I was in an art department within a larger university, I was able (and encouraged) to explore courses outside of art. My alma mater is one of the few universities on the East Coast of the United States to host a dedicated Asian American Studies program and research center, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute. (Most of the best-known ethnic studies departments in the US are in California, on the West Coast.) As someone who was born in the US to Chinese immigrant parents, I was really interested in learning more about Asian American culture and history. Several of the faculty in the Asian American Studies program specialized in media studies and visual culture, especially fashion, so I was fortunate enough that the courses I took with them merged my interests in the racial history of the United States and in the cultural politics of fashion—themes that I explored in my own artmaking practice.

After I graduated with my BFA, I felt that I had had enough of artmaking but still had intellectual interests. New York is, of course, the fashion center of the United States, so there are several universities in the city that have programs in what was then the nascent field of fashion studies. I decided to enroll in the Costume Studies MA program at NYU, which was originally designed to train museum professionals to work at places like the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As such, most of my coursework was focused on fashion history and museum practice, such as exhibition curation, textile conservation, and art management. But I was much more interested in the cultural and social dynamics of fashion and the fashion industry as a social institution. I wrote my MA thesis on the costuming practices of Asian American drag queens and the representation of Asian Americans on the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race.

It was during this time that I also started looking more closely at digital media and social media as potential sites of research. When I decided to apply for a PhD, I looked for communication and media studies programs that specialized in digital and emerging media as opposed to more traditional film and cinema studies programs. I enrolled in the PhD program in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University because of that exact reason. My PhD advisor, for instance, is known in the Chicago area for establishing an organization and streaming platform that supports local independent media producers. While there, I was fortunate enough to join various academic networks, like the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, and I co-founded the Center for Applied Transgender Studies with two of my colleagues. So, all of these different experiences led to where I am today as a researcher of media, fashion, race, and gender.

Why did you choose this profession?

When I was in undergrad, I was curious about graduate school, but I was also apprehensive about going into a PhD program because of all the things I had heard about how precarious academia is. I had a professor (one of the ones I alluded to above) who suggested that I could apply to a funded PhD program and then “masters out”—that is, earn my MA but then drop out before completing the PhD.  “That’s what I did,” she told me. “Well, except then I ended up finishing my PhD.” I ultimately didn’t go that route, as I detailed above. I originally planned to get an MA degree that would allow me to work in a museum, which unfortunately didn’t end up panning out. Instead, I worked as an administrator in a university, where I was surrounded by faculty and grad students and gained more exposure to academia. I realized that what I wanted from a career was the independence and institutional backing to build my own research agenda, which is exactly what a PhD program trains you to do. I wanted to do something with my career that felt like I was making a difference with my work while also having the freedom to pave my own path, and academia seemed like the ideal choice to get there.

Could you tell us about your current areas of research?

My research interests span across many different areas. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in thinking about how images of marginalized groups, especially queer and trans folks and people of color, circulate in media and what these images communicate about race, gender, and sexuality. My specific area of expertise is in fashion studies: I look at both the fashion industry as an institution as well as personal style as a meaning-making practice. I’m also interested in how the social media influencer industry—specifically the beauty influencer community—has produced new forms of gendered and racialized precarity and labor exploitation. To address all of these questions, I draw on a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, including queer of color critique, woman of color feminisms, and critical media and cultural studies.

What is your proudest career achievement so far?

Am I allowed to say getting this job? There’s so much uncertainty on the academic job market, not to mention how much work it takes to apply to academic jobs—it really does feel like a full-time job in itself! I’m so fortunate that I was able to secure a tenure-track position fresh out of my PhD, not to mention a position in a department like the School of Communication here at SFU, which produces groundbreaking research in media and communication studies. It’s the first time I’ve felt like my degree actually helped me to find a job!

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently in the process of developing my PhD dissertation into a book manuscript. This project examines how images of trans women, especially trans women of color, in the fashion, beauty, and media industries produce and communicate ideologies about race, gender, and trans identity. I argue that the idea that greater visibility of trans people will create positive change for the trans community is not as simple as it might seem. Rather, I link media representation to issues of surveillance and transnormativity, or the idea that mainstream media privilege trans people who conform to dominant gender roles. For trans women especially, this includes investing money and labor into maintaining their physical beauty so that they will be accepted as proper women by mainstream audiences. I also draw on interviews and participatory research workshops with trans women and femmes of color where I talk to them about how they navigate beauty standards and gender norms in their everyday lives. Through this research, I propose a trans femme of color critique of media representation that complicates the relationship between mainstream visibility and social justice by asking how trans women and femmes of color actually think about and experience being visible (or invisible).

What is your favourite thing about teaching?

What I really enjoy the most about teaching is challenging students who are just entering adulthood to expand their ways of thinking. I still remember how the courses I took in undergrad pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me reevaluate things about the world that I had previously taken for granted. There’s just so much that we don’t learn in high school that is critical to understanding social history. For instance, I didn’t really learn about how the Chinese Exclusion Act shaped Asian American history and culture until I got to university. I have so much respect for the professors I had in undergrad who helped me to understand how power functions in society, which allowed me to look at the world through a more critical lens. I love it when I get to be that person for younger generations, and I really hope that I can inspire students here at SFU the same way that my professors inspired me.

What would you say is your main motivation for your work?

A lot of my research is informed by my own experiences as a trans femme Asian American who is now settling in Canada. I am so awed and inspired by my queer and trans siblings, and I always try to do what I can as an academic to support them, such as inviting trans women of color who are not in academia to present at academic conferences and events. I’m currently working with a group of trans artists, activists, and academics—Lexi Adsit, Nava Mau, LaVelle Ridley, Raquel Willis, and Juniper Yun—to put together an anthology of writing by trans women of color, many of whom have not had many opportunities to have their work published before. I hope to find ways to use my position at SFU to work more closely with local queer and trans communities of color and to build research partnerships with local community-serving organizations here in Metro Vancouver.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I think people are sometimes surprised to hear that I’m secretly kind of a gamer! I’m a bit of a homebody so I like to spend my free time playing video games on Switch or Playstation. Some of my favorite games are the Persona and Final Fantasy series. When I do go out, I love going to art museums and thrift stores during the day or drag shows in the evening (as you might guess, given what my MA thesis was about).

What books do you currently have on your nightstand?

Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, and The Rupture Files by my friend and colleague Nathan Alexander Moore.