Current Projects
Dissertation
Revolution in the Sheets: The Politics of Sexuality and Tolerance in the Mexican Left, 1919-2001
Issues of sex and sexuality have been in an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with the revolutionary politics of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and other left-wing organizations since their foundation. My dissertation historicizes this enduring divide by examining scandalous explosions of homophobia, heterosexism, and hostility towards sexual politics among political parties and movements of the Mexican Left throughout the twentieth century.
Article
In 1901, Mexico City police discovered forty-one men in the midst of a ball – nineteen of whom were dressed as women. One of the most scandalous events in Mexican history, the “Dance of the Forty-One” transformed the number into a symbol of degeneracy. This article analyzes this symbol, arguing that contestations by activists to remove the stigma tied to the Forty-One, initially part of the process of homosexual liberation, enabled the proliferation of new modes of transgender representation and community dialogue. Download.
Todos/as Somos 41: The Dance of the Forty-One from Homosexual Reappropriation to Transgender Representation in Mexico
Article
Transgressing Che: Irina Layevska Echeverría Gaitán, Disability Politics, and Transgendering the New Man in Mexico
This article uses the life and struggles of trans and disability rights activist Irina Echeverría Gaitán as a lens to examine the sexual, gender, and disability politics of the Mexican Left in the years after the Cuban Revolution. It shows the ways that the model of the “New Man” excluded figures like Echeverría Gaitán due to her medical struggles and nascent gender identity, yet conversely provided a discourse with which to construct a radical militant identity and to denounce homophobic, transphobic, and exclusionary leftist politics. Download.