Cambrey Payne

Becoming Bi: Visualising the Invisible Subject

Honours research

2019

This project examines the discursive strategies employed by bisexuals to construct and intelligible bisexual subject on Tumblr, an online platform with a large queer community. Bisexuals form a significant portion of this community, reflecting their position as the largest sexual minority in the United States (Choi et al. 2018, p. 113). When contrasted with pansexuals, bisexuals show an increased tendency to consider marginalisation as central to their bisexual identity. This has produced a normative bisexual subject that is reliant upon its marginalisation, more than its sexual desires, for its intelligibility. Utilising the work of Judith Butler and Wendy Brown, this project explores the identification with marginalisation as an attempt to stabilise a normatively unstable identity, and attempts to imagine a bisexual identity that can engage with its marginalisation, without relying on it for its sense of Self.

Embodying Autism: the importance of vibrance and connection in autistic lives

PhD research

2020-ongoing

As autism becomes an increasingly contested phenomena across a range of discursive contexts, autistic experiences of embodiment remain largely underexamined and poorly understood. This project explores the ways autistic adults define their experiences of embodiment and construct meaning from these experiences. The project focuses on providing insight into autistic embodiment beyond what is provided by medical models of autism-as-disorder. It prioritises autistic voices, and assumes that autistic adults are experts in their own experiences. Themes emerging from the research and initial analysis indicate an understanding of embodiment that is vibrant and highly relational, constructed and understood through the lens of participants' material-discursive contexts. The autism that emerges alongside this embodiment is likewise connected, vibrant, and provides a meaningful alternative to limiting medico-scientific constructions of autism.

Neurodiversity in HDR Research

Research assistant

Head researcher: Dr. Anna Szorenyi

2022-ongoing