PROJECTS

Colorblind Aesthetics in Latinx Literature and Law (under contract with NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures Series)

This book-length project analyzes how queerness—instead of racial difference—coalesces a group of contemporary Latinx writers. While the Latino subject that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was often explicitly racialized and implicitly straight, the decades since have left the field to contend with the deracialized language of colorblindness and the mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights. I track these shifts—ones that seem to push race into the closet while queerness comes out—through legal histories of immigration, education, and Civil Rights laws to show how, for instance, the US Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003) focus on gender and sexuality while turning a blind eye to race. At first glance, reading the novels and short stories of Carmen María Machado, Salvador Plascencia, Manuel Muñoz, and Justin Torres appear to do the same, too. A closer look, however, shows that when the law ignores race, it hides racism. When Latinx literature removes race, it teaches us to look for it elsewhere: in the language of queerness and the structures of literary form. Colorblind Aesthetics illustrates, then, how race relations today are mediated through gender and sexuality, or how queerness is the language that colorblind race speaks.

Latinx Method and the Politics of Praxis, co-edited with Maia Gil’Adí (under contract with Duke University Press)

This interdisciplinary volume demonstrates how the central concepts of Latinx Studies are sustained by what we do with them, what we do to them, even as those actions are thought to be responsive (instead of constitutive) of latinidad. It convenes Latinx Studies practitioners from the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences who write on practices like “desert as method,” “translation as method,” and “trust as method” to advance novel methodological approaches for the field. For more, see “Queer Lessons on Latinx Methods,” part of ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America’s special issue “Queer in Latin America: LGBTQ+ Perspectives. The issue also includes former student projects that draw inspiration from the works of Alán Peláez López, Iván Monalisa Ojeda, and Piri Thomas to advance new analytical methods like transing as method, double-life as method, and monstrosity as method.

Colorblind: Liberal Racism from Past to Present, co-edited with Melanie Abeygunawardana

Working across the fields of comparative race and sexuality studies, this collaborative volume convenes legal and cultural scholarship that extends critiques of colorblind law and culture backwards to a pre-Civil Rights moment, past the bounds of the mainland US, and beyond the Black-white binary by attending to Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous histories and collectives. This project has been supported by the Sue-Je Gage Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice.