I research and teach at the intersections of critical race theory, queer and disability studies, with a focus on Southern Cone cultural productions. My primary interest lies in engaging queer theory with Luso-Hispanic literature to study gendered and sexualized constructions of the body that are rooted in colonial taxonomies of difference. My work explores how nineteenth-century patriarchal structures shaped the literary, scientific, and artistic practice of the time as well as its reception. I view my research as part of a broader effort within the Humanities to critique how Western medicine produced and reproduced binary systems of corporeal classification—male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, able/disabled, civilized/colonial—that deprived minorities of full human status, promoting and endorsing colonial political assemblages.
My current book project, preliminary titled Argentina’s Sentimental Underworlds: Slum Theatre and the Staging of Queerness and Disability—1880-1930, studies how fin de siècle degeneration theory informed the dramatic practice in the Río de La Plata by promoting a heteronormative and ableist mindset in the staging of the lunfardo stock characters of Buenos Aires’ arrabales. Linyeras, atorrantes, and cirujas (tramps), percantas and malevas (deviant women), and gringos (European immigrants), among other figures, were integrated into the scientific repertoire as the stark contrast to positivism’s evolutionary patterns of human perfection. And yet, the book shows how popular culture, especially tango and sainetes, rendered an alternative image of criminalized lunfardo populations that, although it did not dissolve it, at least complicated, and at times unsettled, the antinomy deviant/normative—healthy/unhealthy—able/disabled. Where degeneration theory sought social regeneration through social prophylaxis or seclusion (castration, imprisonment, or asylum life), the nexus tango-sainete-melodrama explored the manifestation of sex-gender deviance, physical and cognitive impairment with a tragicomic sentimentality. This aesthetic formula became a dramatic artifact that combined sentimentalism with anthropological renditions of the underworlds to suggest that the moral and physical recovery of the lunfardo was desirable in the making of the ideal Argentine citizen. The project suggests that the dramatic study of body difference offers new methodologies to approach the notion of queerness and disability and the primary role they had in the modernization of theatre and new ideas of citizenship, labor, and (re) productive capacity. Plays considered are Degeneración (1918, Martínez), Los curdas (1908, Sánchez), El degenerado (1910, Lola), El epiléptico (1920, Traversa), and El imperio de los instintos (1926, Portell), among others.
I teach courses on the social history of love in the Hispanic tradition, modern Argentine theatre and prose, and global fin de siècle LGBT literatures. My work on queer space, global sexology, and the biopolitics of Latin American naturalism has appeared in Latin American Theater Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Taller de Letras, Symposium, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Palgrave Macmillan, and Himpar. I received the LASA Carlos Monsiváis Best Article of the Sexualities Section and the Canadian Hispanic Association Essay Prize (2022). I hold a PhD in Luso-Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory from Northwestern University and an MA in History from University of British Columbia. Prior to my arrival at The University of Chicago, I was a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellow with the European Commission at Universität zu Köln, Germany. I held fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (University of Toronto, 2021-2023), the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies (Cologne), the Berlin Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University.
Selected Publications
- “Espectáculos ojivales del género: teratologías marimachas y cultura impresa en el México finisecular.” Drag Kings: An Archeology of Spectacular Masculinities in Latino America. Eds. Nathalie Bouzaglo and Javier Guerrero. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2024
- “Bovarismo Crip: lectura novelesca, crisis nerviosas y biopolíticas de la reproducción en el entresiglo.” Ed. Susan Antebi. Legados de la eugenesia en México y las Américas. México DF: 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, 2024.
- “No matarás: los mandatos éticos del rostro en Soldados de Salamina (2001) y La sombra de Heidegger (2005).” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 45, 2023, no. 2, 375-396.
- “Necropolítica del himen naturalista: virginidad, excedentes de vida y poder soberano en Santa (1903), El hijo del Estado (1884) y El himen en México (1885).” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Volume 77, Issue 1, 2023, pp. 14-33.
- “Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires, a Capital of Queer Spectacles.” Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centers. Eds. Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt, and Laura Scuriatti. Palgrave Macmillan (2022).
- “Otto Miguel Cione, erótico sentimental.” Co-authored with Daniel Balderston. Luxuria: la vida nocturna de Buenos Aires. Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2022.
- “Lunfardos: Queerness, Social Prophylaxis, and the Futures of Reproduction in Fin-de-Siècle Argentine Dramaturgy.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 54, no. 2, 2021, pp. 119-43.
- “Governmental Fictions: The Naturalist Novel and the Making of Population in Fin-de-Siècle Brazil.” Taller de letras. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, vol. 66, 2020, no. 1, 2020, pp. 167-183.
- “Tomás Michelena, atrevimientos y desagravios del fin de siglo.” Co-authored with Nathalie Bouzaglo. Débora: Novela original de Tomás Michelena. 1884. Himpar, 2020.
Recent Courses in RLL
- SPAN 21905 Latin American Literatures and Cultures: Colonial and 19th-Century (Spring 2025)
- SPAN 24770/34770 Sex, Crime, and Horror in Argentine Literature (Autumn 2024)
- SPAN 43900 Queerness and Disability in Latin American Culture, 1880-1930 (Autumn 2024)