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Gisabel Leonardo

Profile picture for Gisabel Leonardo

Contact Information

LCLB 4028
PhD Candidate
Teaching Assistant

Biography

Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Being of Dominican heritage, much of her work focuses on the fluctuating identities across the Dominican diaspora, including the United States. She received her BA from the University of North Georgia in Spanish Language and Literature with a minor in Gender Studies and went on to complete her MA in Spanish Literature and Cultures at Georgia State University, where she later worked as a beginner and intermediate level Spanish instructor for three semesters. She is currently a Graduate College Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois with a graduate minor in Latina/Latino Studies. Her current dissertation project looks at racial and sexual performance through hair in diasporic Dominican literary and cultural production.

She is the 2022-2023 LASA Latinx Section Graduate Student Representative and a 2023-2024 Humanities Research Institute Graduate Student Fellow.

 

Research Interests

Caribbean Studies
Dominican-American Literature
Performance Studies

Research Description

Through narrative, stand-up comedy, street art, and theory Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines hair as a means of resistance in the contemporary Dominican Republic and the US Dominican diaspora. By reading hair as a dominant motif of Dominican cultural production, this project draws on Black feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies to articulate how Black and Afro-descendant women “talk back” to authority through a notably femme and Black aesthetic. Accordingly, this project proposes new methodologies by which to engage such themes to think alongside aesthetics of hair and acts of haircare as meaning-bearing tools of self-expression and actualization through a malcriada sensibility that centers Black mother- and daughterhood. The theoretical framework and case studies in this project underscore matrilineal relationships in contemporary Dominican literary and cultural production to offer a feminist intervention in readings about sexual, gendered, and racial forms of deviancy. This project contributes to current scholarship by examining modes of Black feminist resistance and representation in Dominican cultural production. Critical Black feminist theory is grossly underdeveloped in Latin American and U.S. Latinx Studies. As such, at stake with this project is the development of transdisciplinary paradigms that dialogue between fields of study to engage with Black intellectual production in literary and cultural studies. Some of my preliminary questions in this project are: How do Black and Afro-descendant Dominican women use hair as a tool of resistance? What role does maternity and haircare play in the negotiation and rejection of expressions of Blackness? And lastly, how do these women actively assert their deviancy as a form of protest that reimagines dominicanidad?

Education

PhD Spanish Literatures & Cultures (in progress)
MA Spanish- Georgia State University '18
BA Spanish Language & Literature- University of North Georgia '15

Awards and Honors

Graduate College Fellow

List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022

LASA Latinx Studies Graduate Student Representative

Humanities Research Institute Graduate Student Fellow 2023-2024

Courses Taught

Fall 2021

SPAN/ LLS 248: Latin American Diaspora Through Film 

LLS 242: Intro to Latina/o Literature (writing consultant)

Spring 2022

SPAN 232: Spanish in the Community

Fall 2022

SPAN 326: Latin American Afro-Feminisms

 Spring 2023

SPAN/ LLS 248: Latin American Diaspora Through Film

Additional Campus Affiliations

Graduate Minor in Latina/Latino Studies

Presentations

American Studies Association 2021. Creativity within Revolt, "Not Latin American Enough" (roundtable)

Modern Language Association 2022. Multilingual US, Race and the Aesthetics of Refusal in Contemporary Latin America/Hemispheric America (included in presidential theme), “Dios, (Doña) Patria, Libertad: Black, Femme Resistance in Evaristo Angurria’s Doña Patria Murals” POSTPONED

Invited LLAmA Talk at Augsburg University. February 2022. Rolos and Black, Feminist Resistance in Dominican Visual Culture

Latin American Studies Association 2022. Polarización socioambiental y rivalidad entre grandes potencias, Corporeal and Sonic Ecologies, “Teteo Amidst Crisis: The Queer Counterpublics of Dembow”

Latin American Studies Association 2023. América Latina y el Caribe: Pensar, Representar y Luchar por los Derechos, Afrosaberes en las expresiones artísticas latinoamericanas, “Aesthetics of Resistance and Afro-Dominican Womanhood in Ojos Nebulosos 'Kiskeya Salón'”

 

Highlighted Publications

“Popola Politics: Tokischa, Teteos, and Queer Counterpublics in Dominican Dembow,” Depictions of Sexuality in Popular/ Public Culture, edited by Laura Getty and Josef Vice (accepted)

 

Recent Publications

Review of Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, ed. Vanessa K. Valdés, May 2021, Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, https://chasquirll.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Chasqui-Reviews-May-2…

Sueños Music Festival review, PULP Magazine, June 2022: https://www.pulpmagazine.net/post/sue%C3%B1os-chicago-s-new-latin-music…;