Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Jordan Lofthouse and Zane Willard on the Political Economy of Visibility and Drag Races

February 19, 2025·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Jordan Lofthouse opens the discussion with Zane Austin Willard. He situates Willard as a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida and sketches research that spans critical media and cultural studies, surveillance studies, and gender and sexuality studies, all in service of thinking about LGBTQ+ issues through political economy. The conversation quickly turns to definitions. Willard explains cultural studies as a field that draws from sociology, anthropology, literature, history, art history, and media analysis, and the exchange tests how each of those traditions changes what counts as evidence. The distinction between methods matters. One branch emphasizes ethnography, including interviews, fieldwork, and participant observation, while another leans toward textual approaches that read documents, histories, films, and other artifacts as cultural evidence. Surveillance stays central throughout. Willard's scholarship looks at popular culture and legal and political discourse through the racialized, classed, and gendered dimensions of surveillance culture, so the topic never feels incidental. The tone stays measured. Lofthouse keeps returning to what exactly is being studied when one says culture, and Willard responds by moving between shared beliefs and values, ritual and daily practice, and the historical record preserved in books, images, and media. Those distinctions show why different analytical frameworks ask different questions. The episode also treats interdisciplinarity as a method rather than a slogan. Willard does not collapse sociology, anthropology, and humanities approaches into one another, but uses their differences to clarify what political economy can and cannot explain. That caution gives the conversation structure. It keeps the focus on how culture is studied across media, law, and social life. The discussion moves comfortably from concept to implication and back again. It asks what scholarship can do when it takes power, culture, and surveillance seriously enough to refine the questions it asks. The result is patient rather than flashy. It builds an argument about why analytical precision matters when studying LGBTQ+ issues and why the study of culture has to account for both methods and institutions. By the close, the episode has returned to the idea that careful framing can point toward positive change. The value lies in the method as much as the topic. Listeners hear a sustained attempt to connect scholarly distinctions to the conditions under which social problems are named, studied, and addressed. The conversation keeps that connection intact. It offers a compact case for interdisciplinary work that is rigorous, concept-heavy, and attentive to the social world it tries to describe.

As heard by us

A methodical discussion of visibility, surveillance, and LGBTQ+ issues.

Jordan Lofthouse and Zane Austin Willard handle political economy and LGBTQ+ issues with uncommon discipline, treating culture, surveillance, and legal and political discourse as linked rather than separate lanes.

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Why you'd press play

For a slow, serious interview on using political economy to study LGBTQ+ issues.

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