My research addresses the still unresolved question of what “writing” is. My first book project argues that early Latin American novelists embedded intricate theories of writing in their fiction, debunking the myth of the author as a “spontaneously inspired genius” and reconceiving the act of penning as a mediated, embodied, effortful, and ecological activity. In my follow-up research, I explore how South American science fiction and Queer art imagine writing technologies of the future.
More broadly speaking… I am interested in Latin American aesthetics’ potential for expanding the onto-epistemological breadth of other fields of knowledge; some of the intersections that I have explored so far include: media theory, philosophy of technology, and science fiction; motion graphics and aesthetic computing; plastic art and philosophy of art; postmodern novels and theories of individuation; Amerindian thought, contemporary metaphysics, and short fiction; feminist philosophy and perspectival anthropology; poetry, gender identity laws, and LGBTQ+ approaches to the gender/sex dyad. I also worked on the relationship between extractivism and aesthetics in Portugal and Brazil—in particular, I examined the tension between gemstones’ chemical composition, their historical aestheticization, and the forced and exploitative labor inherent in their geological extraction.
