Kai Prins
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Loyola Marymount University
- Los Angeles CA
Biography
Before returning to academia, Kai worked in content marketing and in-house PR/social media for Human Resources and high-tech companies in the SF Bay Area. They are also an award-winning drag performer.
Education
University of Wisconsin - Madison
PhD
Communication Arts
2025
University of Wisconsin - Madison
MA
Communication Arts
2021
University of Florida
BA
English
2008
Social
Areas of Expertise
Industry Expertise
Links
Articles
Uncertain and Anxiously Searching for Answers: The Roles of Negative HealthCare Experiences and Medical Mistrust in Intentions to Seek Information from Online Spaces
Health CommunicationLillie Williamson and Kai Prins
2023-04-18
While online sources of information, like support groups and wellness influencers, can be beneficial for those seeking additional information about their health conditions, these sources can also contain detrimental information. As misinformation and even conspiracies like QAnon proliferate in wellness discourse, particularly in online support groups and on the accounts of wellness influencers, it becomes increasingly important to understand what may contribute to individuals seeking information from these sources. Based on uncertainty in illness theory and the theory of motivated information management, we conducted a cross-sectional survey (N = 544) to test the role of negative health-care experiences and medical mistrust in uncertainty and information seeking from online support groups and wellness influencers across those with chronic and acute health concerns. Results indicated that negative health-care experiences had an indirect effect on information seeking from both online support groups and wellness influencers. This indirect effect, however, operated through uncertainty anxiety but not uncertainty discrepancy. For those with chronic conditions, the indirect effect also included medical mistrust. Implications and future extensions of the results are discussed.
Towards a posthuman turn in drag: Will the queer ever be human?
Queer Studies in Media & Popular CultureKai Prins and Florian Zitzelsberger
2023-04-06
What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in drag performance towards the un/gendered non/post/in/human, we reconsider what, precisely, makes a performance drag. Integrating insights from queer theory, performance studies and critical posthumanism, this editorial develops a framework to not only provide an orientation to the individual contributions of this Special Issue, but also argue for a larger theoretical turn in drag scholarship. We consider the composite materiality of and relationship between the human performer and their posthuman drag, and propose that the act of dragging, which can use, but does not exclusively rely on gender, constitutes a more expansive queer performance modality that makes the familiar strange, yet allows for recognition in what is otherwise unintelligible. Posthuman drag celebrates the abject, the marginal and the un/imaginable, shifts the focus from disaster to potentiality and imagines a future in which queers can be human.
Dodging negativity like it’s my freaking job: marketing postfeminist positivity through Beachbody fitness on Instagram
Feminist Media StudiesKai Prins and Mariah Wellman
2021-10-29
During the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, negativity circulated widely on social media; however, multilevel marketing (MLM) distributors selling fitness programs on Instagram remained blithely positive. In this article, we build upon Katrine Meldgaard Kjær 2019 assertion that “dieting [is] an affective practice” in the context of fitness influencer marketing and follow Kim Toffoletti and Holly Thorpe 2020 suggestion that affect circulates throughout women’s posts about fitness online. We explore how positivity becomes an important marketing device for Instagram fitness influencers in general and how, during periods of intense negative affect and economic uncertainty, such as during the first three months of the pandemic, the maintenance of positivity comes to not only signify the upkeep of proper postfeminist dispositions, but also to provide these influencers and their audiences with the symbolic means to ward off an illness that is circulating literally as a virus and figuratively as negativity. Turning to Beachbody coaches’ Instagram accounts, we illustrate how coaches’ calls to preserve one’s health, increase one’s income, and maintain control in the face of precarity require that they “dodge” the negativity associated with the virus and explicate how this positive “dodge” is tied to larger trends in postfeminist fitness influence online.
Monsters Outside of the Closet: Reading the Queer Art of Winning in The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ WorldmakingKai Prins
2021-06-01
In 2019, The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula became the first drag competition show in the American mainstream media to feature assigned-female-at-birth drag performers: drag king Landon Cider and performance artist Hollow Eve. Although popular queer media heralded their inclusion (and Landon’s eventual crowning) as a categorical win for queer progress and contrasted the show with RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is known for its past exclusionary emphasis on cisgender gay male drag queens, this article demonstrates that the Boulet Brothers may have unintentionally undermined their own radically queer ethos by facilitating a televised drag competition show in the first place. Although critiques of drag competitions tend to center on the highly visible Drag Race, in particular analyzing neoliberal homonormativity in the context of cisgender gay male gender performance, Dragula provides us with an alternate lens for seeing how gender, neoliberal economics, and homonormative “realness” collide when the “monstrous” queer assignedfemale-at-birth body becomes visible. This article grapples with a queer “reading” of Landon Cider’s win and Hollow Eve’s spectacular failure on season 3 of Dragula to ask: What do we do with a show that drags queer monsters out of the closet and into the light? How should we react when our vampires “give us life?” Is the queer art of winning really queer?
