[This paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s0VUWcMDSyP080_Xg_G35q9v1TtXnDzw/view) formally models and analyzes the heterogenous impact of an exogenous unemployment shock on men and women’s time spent in housework. Using household fixed effects models, I find that married women spend 6.4 additional hours on housework when they become unemployed while married men only spend an additional 3.4 hours on housework. This gendered impact also appears among singles, although they have a smaller response to their unemployment shock compared to their married counterparts. The presence of children greatly amplifies the gender gap in housework hours and may lead more working women to voluntarily reduce their market work to assume domestic responsibility. Finally, I find some evidence that more generous unemployment insurance may offset this increase in housework hours for wives, albeit quite minimally. These overall results indicate that gender norms associated with housework and childcare greatly influence the unequal distribution of housework and highlight the challenges to women’s future work hours and re-employment.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FozNm771TkmSmwl1KTXIVDt8J3vV2%2FHMFTrqIm0XbS4L7mfhDG%2F22512365-a545-4e25-aa02-de19f916db9d.png?alt=media&token=9f984238-00c0-4272-ac04-dc4a1e3db9b1","id":"22512365-a545-4e25-aa02-de19f916db9d","width":1876,"height":1364,"filename":"model1.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Wives respond more greatly to their housework commitment when they become unemployed and when they are voluntarily unemployed.","border":false}]}
```

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FozNm771TkmSmwl1KTXIVDt8J3vV2%2FHMFTrqIm0XbS4L7mfhDG%2F7139d7cb-31e9-4f31-8626-9c807d31e380.png?alt=media&token=b8a1fd6c-d35a-46a2-bbc6-1e072ad55017","id":"7139d7cb-31e9-4f31-8626-9c807d31e380","width":1876,"height":1364,"filename":"children.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Children amplify wives' housework hours much more than they do for husbands' hours.","border":false}]}
```

Gendered Housework

In his work *Cruising Utopia*​​, the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz describes places like the nightclub as a site with “queer world-making” capacities. It opens the possibility for community, celebration, and existence in an otherwise heteronormative world. While it may be perceived as a form of escapism by the dominant sphere, queer nightlife is a crucial space where queer performances and lives are produced and sustained. In performing new styles and connecting with other queer Asians, I have grown deeply interested in how individuals and communities within Asia navigate their regional settings that regulate and exclude particular forms of queer identity and expression. By continuing my engagement with new performances and immersing myself within these locations, I aim to discover  how queer Asians struggle to adhere to these hetero-capitalist economies while creating their own regional worlds of queer life, networks, capital, and performance.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FozNm771TkmSmwl1KTXIVDt8J3vV2%2FfsE1VZP04QaQIzKowDFx%2Fb118f399-f47c-450d-8d12-04bafa482ee8.jpg?alt=media&token=c2613bed-8a4f-4953-8bfe-2afe8377be4b","id":"b118f399-f47c-450d-8d12-04bafa482ee8","width":1000,"height":471,"filename":"art.jpg","type":"image/jpeg","caption":"Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz","border":true}]}
```

Exploring queer Asia de-centers the United States as the locus of queer life, and it broadens the scope of where and how queerness can be performed. Through my travels to Hong Kong, Bangalore, and Bangkok, I will not just learn how queerness is regulated within the nightclub, but discover how it can be modulated in spaces like the "home, workplace, streets, region, nation, and diaspora" (Khubchandani, "Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore"). Moreover, I will actively perform alongside these communities through new styles such as voguing, Bollywood-style drag, and K-Pop dance covers. Each of these sites and performance styles highlights the need to focus on various forms of self-expression, networks, and economies that deviate from the trajectories of the West.

While locating these spaces might be challenging, I will connect with queer organizations to guide me to particular nightlife sites and performers. Along the way, I will help plan an annual queer festival in Hong Kong, assist on a project that helps transgender communities in India find employment, and promote better livelihood options for sex workers in Thailand through social support groups. At the same time, I will be connected with queer student networks, local queer businesses, and key government and corporate stakeholders. These diverse interactions will provide additional lenses of learning how non-Western queer subjects make their livings, how they choose to perform themselves, and how they can build their own social, cultural, and economic capital via their local queer networks. Through these relationships, I hope to learn and contribute to localized efforts of coping with these queer struggles.

The goal of my project is to foreground the possibilities of queer world-making within a larger capitalist society. In concretizing the world I create with other queer performers, businesses, and organizations, I plan to develop a narrative that captures the memories, moments, and histories of these lived experiences through a collection of random, ephemeral paraphernalia—things like club vouchers, job flyers, photographs and personal vlogs, makeup brushes, and deflated balloons from house parties. Such objects serve as an alternative archive that speaks to and records these new economies and performances. It also spotlights the discourse of queer life away from the Western sphere and positions Asian subjectivities within their own local circuits and social terrains. By exploring these new geopolitical contexts from a variety of perspectives, I embrace a cross-cultural understanding of queerness, social, and economic policy that I plan to carry into my life’s work. More importantly, opening our queer-world making capacities allows us to imagine the potential for new queer horizons, untethered from the West and also from Asia, that find power through their own regional contexts in a capitalist world.

Queer Asia: Shaping New Queer Economies and Performance

Researcher

Class Of 1945 Chandler Memorial Fellowship

Awarded $30,000 grant to support a year of purposeful, independent study outside the United States.

Carl Van Duyne Prize in Economics

Awarded $5,000 for honors economics thesis project.

Highest Honors in Economics

Competitively selected to study abroad at Exeter College at the University of Oxford for one academic year.

Performing Gender? Explaining the Heterogenous Impact of Unemployment and Unemployment Insurance on Housework

Partisan Influences on the Economic Impact of Local Closures During COVID-19

Curate and send twice-monthly newsletter to over 20,000 subscribers

Class Notes

Pioneered state healthcare tool for policymakers and employers to leverage better healthcare prices. Analyze relationships beween profit and cash reserve changes for short-term, acute Texas hospitals.

Public Policy Intern

Awarded $5,000 stipend to conduct full year honors economics thesis mentored by Professor Lucie Schmidt. Modeled and analyzed impact of unemployment shocks on collective intra-household home production supply.

Beyond Jonathan Deng

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