Prof. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez has been awarded the Criticism & Interpretive Theory Junior Research Fellowship for the years 2019-21 given by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

This fellowship support is for her current book in progress, A Body Exposed: The Aesthetics of Sex, Death, and Mexicanness, which contends that the representation of violence against sexual minorities is central to the construction and critique of Mexican and Latinx subject formation. Through close readings of national narrative literature, detective fiction, photographic documentary, cultural history, installation art, dance, and queer narrative and performance art, this book situates aesthetics, ethics, and politics in close proximity to reveal how that Mexican and U.S. Latinx writers and artists expose the affective bond that links sexual practice with the politics of modernity. Bringing together continental philosophy, deconstructive ethics, queer theory, and postcolonial theory, A Body Exposed departs from the idea of a sovereign subject, in favor of examining of how anxieties about political and social duress are performed, projected, and articulated onto and through the bodies of those who reside outside the structures of power that have already marked them as marginal. In doing so, this book argues that how one feels Mexican may be thought through and from the ways their sexual body moves in social and material worlds where other fictions and feelings also roam.

The fellowship will help Prof. Cervantes-Gómez undertake the research necessary to complete the manuscript, and as part of the award, she also will be named a Criticism & Interpretive Theory Junior Fellow and will receive discretionary research funds to be used towards the project. The Unit will also organize a manuscript workshop to assist her in the publication of his study.