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Research Projects
Project | 01 Queer Imaginations: Policing Transnational Queer Cultures in Argentina and Spain (1942-1982)
My first manuscript relies on a broad range of sources: judicial transcripts, forensic exams, police, censorship, and psychiatric records, love letters and erotica, interviews with activists and medical doctors, folk music, films, memoirs, and novels. By shifting knowledge production south-ward to rural, metropolitan, and urbanizing milieus in South America and Southern Europe, I problematize the view of the passive/active binary as a static grammar. I argue that queer individuals carved out spaces for their erotic and social experiences between the performance and the violation of the norm. They challenged the expectation that they would pursue isolated and meaningless lives, leaving instead meaningful testimonies of the constitution and obliteration of the self in homoeroticism.
Project | 02 Los archivos eróticos del Franquismo (1954-1979)
My second book project (in Spanish) analyzes the relationships among intimate desires, international politics, preservation, and erasure. Cold War politics and an economic policy prioritizing international tourism contributed to the Franco regime’s selective censorship of eroticism. The historiography on sexual liberalization in Spain––the last bastion of fascism in Europe––focuses on establishing its role in the modernization and democratization of mass culture through erotic films and magazines. My project takes a more intimate turn by centering on amateur pornographers and their confiscated erotica, which were paradoxically archived and preserved by the regime. In this way, I argue that the Cold War alliances of the Franco regime created conditions of virtual immunity for international visitors.
Project | 03 The Queer Republic of Letters in Latin America and Iberia
This digital project goes beyond the North/South dynamics at the center of the previous scholarship and traces the intellectual and affective queer communities built through correspondence among Hispanophone performers, authors, readers and activists from the pre-Stonewall to the sexual liberation eras. In order to receive the necessary training for this project, I worked with Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship and attended the “Ethical Data Visualization” workshop at the 2019 Digital Humanities Summer Institute. In parallel, in collaboration with the Brown Digital Repository, I managed the digitization, curation, and online sharing of the collection “The First Wave: The Histories and the Archives of the LGBT+ Movements in Latin American in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s”.
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