Y Howard [Yetta Howard] is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Dr. Howard specializes in sexuality studies, queer theory, and cultural histories of gender and feminism in the context of visual, auditory, and corporeal forms. Deeply invested in underground cultures, Howard's work focuses on experimental, anti-aesthetic, and avant approaches to 20th- and 21st-century minoritarian arts. Howard publishes extensively on and is an educator of cinematic, sonic, graphic, performance-based, and bodily phenomena.
Howard is the author of Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and the editor of Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). Some of their work also appears in American Literature; Social Text; Sounding Out!; TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; The Journal of Popular Culture; Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory; Fiction International; The Middle Spaces; and in the volumes Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century; Keywords for Comics Studies; The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In; On the Politics of Ugliness; and Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O'Brien. Howard's current in-progress book project is "Erratic Erotics: Analog - Sexualities - Mortalities."
A photographer working in both analog and digital forms since the 1990s, outside and within the context of research projects, Howard has had exhibition activity throughout California including at Oceanside Museum of Art (Oceanside, CA); Gallery 21, Spanish Village Art Center - Balboa Park (San Diego, CA); Front Porch Gallery (Carlsbad, CA); Arc Gallery and Studios (San Francisco, CA); The FRONT Arte y Cultura (San Ysidro, CA); and is included in related exhibition catalogues for Six-Word Story (OMA) and F213 (NCWCA).
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- Ph.D., English, University of Southern California, 2010
- Certificate in Gender Studies, University of Southern California, 2010
- M.A., English, University of Southern California, 2005
- M.A., English, Mills College, 2002
- Certificate in Professional Editing, University of California, Berkeley, 2002
- B.A., English, Boston University, 1998