Geeking Out With...Cali McKenzie
December 1, 2025
Abigail Arnold
Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to graduate students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.
Cali McKenzie is a second-year master’s student in Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their research focuses on the intimate and erotic experiences of people who identify as outside of the gender binary, specifically within the kink community. They joined Geeking Out With… to talk about their research, how it has developed, and their future goals.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Tell me about your research and how you became interested in this topic.
I work with people who identify as outside of the gender binary and talk to them about their intimate or erotic experiences, specifically within the kink community. I came to this project through my work with an interdisciplinary critical psychology lab, The SexTech Lab at the New School, starting when I was an undergraduate. We were working on a project with genderqueer people ages eighteen to twenty-five, and it became clear there were not enough narratives about their intimate and erotic experiences. I wanted to fill a gap and expand these narratives. I especially wanted to look at the kink community because of the way it makes power transactions quite apparent and its use of coded language which allows the changing of embodiment without changing the body itself. Kink has been historically framed in academic and legal discourse as an individual psychopathology, but a lot of the people I’ve talked to have framed it as what Soyini Madison calls “co-performative witnessing” – a type of witnessing of one another that requires reciprocity.
Unlike with the earlier project at the SexTech Lab, I’m working with participants of a wide age range, from twenty to fifty years old. I conducted nine semi-structured interviews that were an average of two hours long; I wanted to give people a full opportunity to share their voices since these participants often don’t have much of a platform to do so. I also did participant observation and fieldwork.
Has there been anything you’ve discovered in your research that has surprised you or been unexpected?
I think what really surprised me in the work I was doing was the community I was engaging in and the deep forms of kinship people had with one another. I was expecting a certain level of community, but I was really amazed to see both the conflicts and the solidarity in the community. It taught me a lot about how I want to exist in and engage with my own community in the future. One of my participants said, “Everyone wants community until you have to be the friend who drives someone to the airport at 5 AM,” and that’s really something to think about.
Were your participants eager to welcome you into their communities, or did you have to work hard to get them to trust you as an outside researcher?
Because of the precariousness that genderqueer people and others who express non-mainstream sexuality are facing right now, there was a level of “How can we trust you?” However, as I am genderqueer myself, there was also a beautiful solidarity between us, as we are experiencing similar things at this moment. Mia Mingus, the disability rights activist, talks about “access intimacy” – this means not necessarily fighting for a specific right together but sitting with and supporting another person whose needs you understand. It was really beautiful to have.
Where are your participants from? Are they all part of one community, or do they come from different groups and areas?
I generally talked to people in the Northeastern United States, who didn’t all know each other. What’s most pertinent to know is that different states have different laws around consent, and that played a lot into my work. For example, in Massachusetts, you can legally consent to rope and bondage but not to certain other forms of physical play, so people will travel out of state for that. There are politics surrounding the state and place you are occupying and what you can do there.
How has your project evolved as you’ve worked on it? Where would you like to take it in the future?
I just presented my work at the Lesbian Lives Conference put on by the Journal of Lesbian Studies, which was my first attempt at seeing how my work resonated with the academic community. I want to write a master’s thesis and eventually publish my work. Beyond seeing important narratives of gender diversity in sexuality and intimacy and the kink community, I also want to pursue what it means to use genderqueerness as an ontological approach, refute dualisms, and show how participants are thinking about existing in a liminal space. What would it mean to have multiple contradicting, shifting forms of subjectivity? I want to make contributions on both the narrative and theoretical levels. This is challenging because sex is a precarious research topic in the current political climate, but it’s also a very important one.
Who at Brandeis has helped you in your work?
Brian Horton is my advisor and the PI of my project, so I’ve worked closely with him. He’s been incredibly helpful; he’s knowledgeable about broader issues related to the topic and pushes me to consider them. I took his class on biopolitics and am currently taking his gender and sexuality seminar, which have both been critical to my graduate training. I also took Shoniqua Roach’s Black Feminist Thought class, which was incredibly critical to my work in teaching me new methodologies and how to engage with the complexities of conversations about pleasure. For that class, I wrote a paper reviewing a book called The Color of Kink by Ariane Cruz, one of the few books about Black women’s experiences in kink; this really helped in my work as well. Gowri Vijayakumar has also been very helpful to me in writing my IRB approval documents and considering my work’s design plan and process. She pushed me to take questions that were halfway there one step further.
When you’re not working on your research, what do you like to do?
I try to physically move my body, since graduate students have to spend so much time sitting at a desk. I love to ice skate and will be on the ice at least a few times a week. It fills me with joy and is a great way to get away from my phone, email, and laptop. Standing on blades is a really great excuse not to reply to email! I also love arts and crafts and picking up different crafts. Right now, I’m knitting a scarf.
What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?
Especially if your passion is academic, have something outside of your passion that gives you some form of challenge, support, gratification, or learning. This gives you a way to still fulfill the passion of learning without having added pressure. You need to find things outside of your passion that can support you in times you need to walk away for a minute, take a break, or think about feedback you received. Ice skating lets me challenge myself with new spins and jumps, but it’s not my job to excel at it – it’s a hobby and not a chore. While I love the academic work I do, I think it’s important to have other things that fulfill you too. I’ve seen people do baking or weight lifting – hobbies where you can achieve new things and challenge yourself.