AJ Jones (she/her) is a medical and psychological anthropologist interested in subjectivity formation and the socio-medicalized frameworks that animate experiences of bodily difference. Utilizing performance ethnography and multimodal methodologies, her research seeks to simultaneously explore and foster accessibility and care-oriented approaches in anthropology.
AJ's doctoral project, “Performing the Missing X: Sex, Gender, Disability, and Ambivalent Identity Politics in the U.S.,” investigates how medical imaginaries shape sex, gender, and disability identities with a focus on the experiences of Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition resulting from a partially or entirely missing X chromosome. Centering the lived tensions and contradictions at the heart of the condition, Turner Syndrome emerges as a powerful magnifying lens to elucidate the processes through which individuals leverage, expose, and subvert cultural norms to carve out meaningful identities and relationships in the contemporary United States. Recognizing aesthetics as a sensuous and ethical way of being in the world and with our interlocutors, this research centers theatrical methodologies and materials to demonstrate how co-producing knowledge takes seriously and helps to locate ambivalence as a central medium of care and meaning-making.
AJ's second project will center the experiences of asexual and aromantic individuals living in the St. Louis area through a combination of traditional ethnographic methods and an interlocutor-driven multimodal workshop. Narrating human connections that are outside of heteronormative expectations of sex, this research will explore how those in ace and aro communities productively trouble ideals of citizenship and its entanglement in medical narratives of (re)productivity, especially in the current political climate of Missouri and the United States.
Selected Publications and Theatrical Works
Jones, AJ. 2022. “Improvising Care: A Theatrical Exploration of Turner Syndrome Subjectivities,” Ethos 50: 375-91.
Jones, AJ. 2022. “Rupturing Role-Play: Ethnographic Theater and Disability,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsites, September 6.