About

Cristina Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include feminist methodologies, sexualities, race/ethnic studies, body/embodiment, Latina/o/x studies, qualitative methods, sex work, and women of color feminisms. She is engaged in exploring issues related to gender, race, and sexuality through various interdisciplinary approaches, contributing to the understanding of marginalized identities and social justice.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Literature
• Art
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Playpen: Racialization, Embodiment, and Symbolic Boundary Maintenance among Erotic Dancers

  Qualitative Sociology · 2025-12-18

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• Racialized Embodiment and Eroticism

  Sex & Sexualities · 2025-05-01 · 4 citations

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  Sexualities scholarship in sociology and the social sciences often leaves sexuality, as an axis of power, uninterrogated, inadvertently sustaining the power it seeks to critique. Even the scholarship that weaves sexuality with race, class, or/and gender tends to operate disconnected from questions of the body. In this article, we unearth historically relevant aspects of how sexualities became implicated in sustaining a single lens, then survey current scholarship on the racialized embodiment, revealing how approaches to studying racialized embodiment that do not center whiteness or operate from an unwittingly “race-neutral” location offer us with nuanced accounts of the body as implicated in, and produced by, the social world. We also consider the instrumentalization of the erotic in current empirical work, deploying erotic capital in erotic labor today. We close with implications for future work based on our review of the field.

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• Racialized sexualization & agency in exotic dance among women

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 2 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
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• Reading the Body: Latina Desirability and Profit in Erotic Labor

  Figshare · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Through the analysis of an eighteen-month ethnography at a strip club in the New York tristate area, this thesis foregrounds body and embodiment as a theoretical intervention in the racialization of Latinas. This thesis unveils how Latinas manage their participation in erotic labor utilizing constructions of Latinidad - particularly embodiment cues that reflect their experiences with racialization. My findings illustrate Latinas' management of a U.S. racial binary and how Latinas are perceived by non-Latina dancers. Among the markers of negotiation in Latinas' racialization are the way music is used, clothing choices, their presentation of dancing, the management of their bodies, and their relationship with clients as forms of differentiation from other dancers; no less important is how they constantly define Latinidad for themselves - against that Black/White binary, and amongst other Latinas. This study's implications include the linking of disparate areas of research and theorizing around racialization, sexuality, embodiment, and Latinidad.

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• Sexuality and Criminal Justice

  2020-04-14

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• Trans Studies

  2020-03-24 · 1 citations

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• Constructing Eroticized Latinidad: Negotiating Profitability in the Stripping Industry

  Gender & Society · 2019-07-26 · 9 citations

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  Through the analysis of an 18-month ethnography at an exotic dance club located in the Northeastern United States (referred to as Playpen), I uncover how Latina exotic dancers manage their participation in exotic dance by deploying constructions of Latinidad as embodied cues. I focus on Playpen’s weekly event, “Latina Night,” to demonstrate how racialized, sexualized, and gendered constructs relative to Latinidad are produced and regulated in this exotic dance setting. Study participants draw on embodied markers to negotiate how their bodies are read. Those markers include nationality-based appeals, time elapsed since migration, and the ability to express constructions of Latinidad through dance performance. I draw on intersectionality as a conceptual tool, filtered through a sensibility to Latina/o/x lives and experiences, to analyze the nuances of racialization as experienced by Latinas. This approach destabilizes the U.S. black–white racial binary and opens intersectionality to a more nuanced understanding of the production of Latinidad. By approaching racialization as an embodied phenomenon, I elucidate how bodily markers, beyond skin color, become imbued with racialized meaning and condition racialized erotic capital. No less important is how participants draw on racialized, gendered, and sexualized tropes to benefit racialized erotic capital.

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• Racialized sexualization & agency in exotic dance among women

  Journal of Lesbian Studies · 2019-11-08 · 4 citations

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  Through the analysis of two years of ethnographic observations and 40 in-depth interviews with a collective of Black and Puerto Rican exotic dancers (referred to herein as "Divine Dancers") who perform exotic dance for other women, this article explores how spatial expressions of sexuality within the context of a woman-only exotic dance venue enables both the resistance and reinforcement of circulating discourses of race, gender, and sexuality that construct sexual desirability under the male gaze. In contrast to literatures on exotic dance that center the heteromasculinist arrangement of the U.S. gentleman's club, this article centers the construction of a woman-only exotic dance space that is absent of men and white women. I situate this analysis within critiques put forward by the feminist sex wars to argue that space and place, in tandem with racialized sexualization, shapes women's potential to enact agency in the domain of exotic dance. In this article, I focus on the contestation of whiteness as a normative standard of beauty by Divine Dancers, and the ways in which norms regarding touch and intimacy are regulated within this exotic dance setting, which I argue allows for new interactions between dancers and audience members. This article disrupts binary understandings of exotic dance as either exploitative or demeaning, focusing instead on dancers' interpretations of agency as expressed through the body in space. I find that the extent to which Divine Dancers find this spatial context sexually empowering is shaped through gendered sexuality and their experiences with racialized sexualization.

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• Undoing Borders: A Feminist Exploration of Erotic Performance by Lesbian Women of Color

  OpenCommons at University of Connecticut (University of Connecticut) · 2019-01-01

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  This study explores the experiences of the “Divine Dancers[1],” a Black and Puerto Rican collective of 40 women from across the United States who convene 10 to 12 times a year to plan, manage, and perform in exotic dance shows for other women. I draw on 23 months of ethnographic observations and 40 in-depth interviews with members of this collective to explore how Divine Dancers’ performance spaces, which are absent of the power dynamics of cis men and White women, enable Black and Latina women to exercise agency over the conditions of their participation in exotic dance.\nMy work speaks to the sociological literatures of body and embodiment (Grosz 1994, Witz 2000, Crossley 2001, Shilling 2007), race and ethnicity (Omi & Winant 1994, Puri 2016, Vidal-Ortiz 2004), and gender and sexuality (Collins 2005, Rodríguez 2014) as a theoretical intervention that starts from the embodied standpoint (Moraga 1983, Moya 1997) of Black and Latina exotic dancers (Brooks 2010, 2012). I advance an embodied approach (Khan, 2019) to racialization that reveals the intersection of the body (including such features as body size, girth, weight) and other embodied qualities (such as emotional expressions and performance) as markers of racialization (Hernandez 2009) that ultimately challenges the dominance of the U.S. Black/White racial binary (Omi & Winant 1994, Perea 1997). I center the body to show how racialized constructs relative to Blackness and Puerto Rican-ness (Landale & Oropesa 2002) become marshaled for racialized erotic capital (Brooks 2012) within the context of Divine Dancer shows, and exotic dance more broadly.\n[1] Divine Dancers is a pseudonym for the actual name of the collective.

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• Book Review: <i>Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession, Colonial Violence, and Resistance among Indigenous and Racialized Women</i> by Julie Kaye

  Gender & Society · 2018-04-19

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