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707 South Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
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Biography
[Faculty photo shows a brown Latina woman in neutral makeup with black hair and blonde highlights. It is daylight in the photo, she is wearing a grey knit sweater with her hair partially covering her face, and there is green foliage in the background.]
Dr. Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez is a transdisciplinary queer and performance theorist, who researches and writes in the interstices between Latin American and U.S. Latinx cultural studies, continental philosophy, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary literature. Cervantes-Gómez is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin American Literatures and Cultures and holds faculty affiliations across disciplines including the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, Religion, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program at the University of Southern California. She also holds a master's degree in Religions of the Americas and Theology from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from the University of California, Riverside. Prior to the University of Illinois, Cervantes-Gómez held both predoctoral and postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Cervantes-Gómez's contributions to the disciplines has included recently serving on the editorial board of Women & Language, as co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Sexualities Studies Section, and holding leadership positions at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). She currently serves on the executive committee of The Mexican Forum of the Modern Languages Association (MLA).
Research Interests
20th and 21st-Century Latin American and US. Latinx literatures and cultures, modern Mexican and Chicanx literary and artistic cultures, Pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican cultural studies, Latin American and U.S. Latinx religious and theological studies, Afro-Latinidades, Afropessimism, queer theory, transgender studies, performance studies, continental philosophy, deconstruction
Research Description
Dr. Cervantes-Gómez's research centralizes issues and contentions of embodiment, sexuality, and performance in contemporary Latin American and U.S. Latinx visual art and literature. Her first book, Pasivo Exposed: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance at the Bottom, examines the performance and aesthetic encounters with sex and death in mid-century nationalist narratives, LGBT fiction, feminist and queer performance art, film, and religious rituals as collectively embodied practices gesturing toward the larger stakes of ideas of the nation-state, state violence, and sexual politics in contemporary Mexican and Hemispheric Latinx cultural production. Derived from this work, her article "Paz's Pasivo: Thinking Mexicanness from the Bottom" is the 2021 Winner of the Premio Sylvia Molloy for Best Article in the Humanities, presented by the Latin American Studies Association Sexualities Studies Section.
In concert with her work in critical race theory, affect, and performance studies, Cervantes-Gómez is also working concurrently on two books: Over My Dead Body: Thinking for a Trans of Color Negativity and Latin Remix: A Queer of Color Mixtape for the End of the World. This ongoing work examines the aesthetic of performance, sexuality, race, and transgender community in the contemporary Hemispheric Americas, namely Brazil, Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States.
Cervantes-Gómez's essays, contributing chapters, and book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Men and Masculinities, Chasquí: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, ASAP/Journal, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Routledge Handbook for Material Religion.
Education
Ph.D., University of Southern California
M.A., University of Southern California
M.T.S., Harvard University
B.A., University of California, Riverside
Courses Taught
Graduate Courses
SPAN 535. The Politics of Pleasure: Latin America Queered, Exposed, and Affected
SPAN 572. Theory and Literary Criticism
SPAN 442/LLS 442/GWS 464: Transx (Fall 2022)
SPAN 468: The Queer Experimental (Spring 2023)
Undergraduate Courses
SPAN 254. Approaches to Culture
SPAN 326. Sex and Power in the Latin American Aesthetic Imaginary
SPAN/LLS 246. Divas: Performance and Storytelling in Latinx Popular Culture
SPAN 324. Latin American Religion, Myths, and Rituals: Then and Now
SPAN/LLS 246: Queer Latinx Feminisms
SPAN 324: Malinche's México
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Assistant Professor, Gender and Women's Studies
Assistant Professor, Latina/Latino Studies
Assistant Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Assistant Professor, Religion
Assistant Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Recent Publications
Cervantes-Gómez, X. V. (2021). Lechedevirgen Trimegisto's Inferno Varieté, Queer Mexicanness, and the Aesthetics of Risk. ASAP/Journal, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2021.0008
Cervantes-Gómez, X. V. (2021). Where Blackness dies: The aesthetics of a massacre and the violence of remembering. Journal of Visual Culture, 20(1), 25-47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412921999456
Cervantes-Gómez, X. V. (2020). Paz’s Pasivo: Thinking Mexicanness from the Bottom. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 29(3), 333-347. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2019.1675146
Cervantes-Gómez, X. V. (2019). Review: Carl Fischer's Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence. Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 48(1), R18-R19.
Cervantes, V. D. (2017). Review: H. Pérez's A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire. Men and Masculinities, 20(2), 279-280. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X16671363