Dr Vek Lewis

BA Hons (Monash), PhD (Monash)
Lecturer in Latin American Studies
Room 718 MacCallum-Brennan Building (A18)
Phone: +61 9351 4524
Email:

My research focuses on representations of sexual minorities, marginalised groups and urban life in contemporary Latin American cultural production.

Having published on visualisations of sexual minorities in cinema, literature and television in recent years, I am now embarking on a socio-legal studies project about media, sexual minorities and the law. This project looks at the way the ‘social problem’ of transgender travestis was constructed in the public domain in the Mexican border town of Tecate, Baja California, and how the media was a key resource to both claimants’ successful arguments of the necessity to legislate against this population, and the law’s eventual framing of these ‘criminal’ subjects in a new ordinance effected in 2002. The project is in part ethnographic – interviews with those affected by the law will be undertaken – and also linguistic, conducting a critical discourse analysis of the language used in the media about these subjects and the language used within the discursive events of the application of the law, from its promulgation to its enactment in the everyday.

Continuing this line of interest in urban minorities, representation, ethnographic research and discourse analysis, another project in the pipeline, Representing/Raptivismo!, will examine the meanings and uses of non-commercial hip hop music in a selected number of Latin American cities. I plan to spend time living with and studying hip hop communities during my sabbatical, in order to understand the social and communitarian functions of this new grassroots form of politicised speech.

My teaching interests lie in Latin American popular cultural forms, youth subcultures and resistance movements.

• Contemporary Latin American literature
• 20th and 21st Century Latin American cinema
• Gender, Sexuality and Postcolonial Studies
• Mass media representations
• Socio-legal studies
• Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
• Human rights and new social movements

• Trans/figurations: Gender Crossing in Contemporary Latin American Written and Visual Narratives (Book project)
• The discursive interconnections between the language of the law and the language of the media: how law draws on cultural knowledges in Mexico

Book Chapters

• ‘When “Macho” Bodies Fail: Spectacles of Corporeality and the Homosocial/sexual in Mexican Cinema’ in Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Santiago Fouz-Hernández, I.B. Tauris, (forthcoming 2009)

Journal Articles

• ‘Grotesque Spectacles: The Janus Face of the State and Gender Variant Bodies in the Work of Reinaldo Arenas’ in Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana (Forthcoming, May 2009).
• ‘Performing Translatinidad: “Miriam” the Mexican Transsexual Reality Show Star and the Tropicalisation of Difference in Anglo-Australian Media’ in Intimate Visions: Sexuality, Representation and Visual Culture, Spec. Issue of Sexualities (U.K.) (Forthcoming, December 2008)
• ‘Of Lady Killers and “Men Dressed as Women”: Soap Operas, Scapegoats and the Mexico City Police Department’ in PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 5.1, January 2008. see: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/480
• ‘Sociological Work on Transgender in Latin America: Some Considerations’ in Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (JILAS) 12.2, 2006, 71-90.
• ‘Walking in the “delinquent” city’ in Place, Memory, Identities: Australia, Spain and the New World. Antipodas XV Special Issue, 2003-4.
• ‘La noche delincuente: la representación del prostituto en El vampiro de la colonia Roma, Las púberes canéforas, y La Virgen de los Sicarios’ in JILAS: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 9:1, 2003. see pdf at www.ailasa.org/jilas

Translations

• ‘First (I) Dream’ (extract from poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz); ‘Dreamless City’ (poem by Federico García Lorca); ‘Your Skull’ (poem by Jaime Saenz) in Dreamhoard, ed. John Kinsella, Salt Books, (October 2008)
• ‘The City: Deconstructing the Barcelonan Imaginary’ by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. (translation) Más allá de la periferia: narrativas de identidad en Cataluña, Galicia y el País Vasco/Beyond the Periphery: Narratives of Identity in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia. (Ed. Stewart King) Spec. Issue of Antipodas XVIII, 2007.

Teaching

• Latin American Popular Culture
• Latin American Film and Literature
• Introduction to Spanish Translation
• First year lectures on Latin America
• Critical and Cultural Studies – theory and methodology (Honours, 2009)
• Latino/a Studies (Masters, 2009)

Research supervision

• Latin American literature and film
• Queer, gender and trans studies
• Post-revolutionary, modern and contemporary Mexico and Cuba
• Debates in Latin American cultural studies
• Revolution and resistance movements in Latin America
• Visual and musical cultures

PhD candidate:

• Locas e internacionales: Subjectivity and Social Relatedness among the sexually diverse in Ciudad de México (joint with Anthropology)

MPhil candidate:

• The Representation of Conflict in the Press in Venezuela

Honours (in 2008):

• Politics as carnival in Tintin: comic as deliberate satire (joint with French)
• Comparative study of land rights between Chilean and Australian indigenous peoples and relations to the State
• Gated cities and imaginaries of risk: Mexico City and the violence of the mediatised everyday

• ‘Do Political Identities Translate Cross-Culturally? The Case of “Transgender” in Latin America’. First ISA World Forum of Sociology, Barcelona, Spain, September 5-8, 2008.
• ‘Representando/Raptivismo: el hip hop underground en América Latina’. The Popular in Spain, Portugal and Latin America: VIII Biennial Conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA), June 4-6, 2008.
• ‘Policing “Public” Bodies?’ Seminar Series, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, May 16, 2008.
• ‘Media, Law, and Sexual Minorities: The Case of Travestis in Mexico’. Transsomatechnics: Theories and Practices of Transgender Embodiment. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. May 1- 3, 2008.
• ‘Not the Latin American “Subaltern”, but Critical & Political Ethnography in Latin America!” Futuros de Latinoamérica Latin America after ‘Latin America’. Invited speaker, seminar series, Institute of Postcolonial Studies,
  Melbourne, April 16, 2008
• ‘Travestis in Latin American Cinema’. Image et Nation Film Festival, Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada. Nov 15-21, 2007.
• ‘Travesti Citizenship: Contesting Liberalism, Contesting Exclusion’. After the Washington Consensus: Visions for a New América. LASA, Montreal, Québec, Canada. Sept 5-8, 2007.
• ‘(Dis)simulations: Orlando Rojas’s Cinema of Camuflaje and Transformismo as Metaphor in Las Noches de Constantinopla’. Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary Cuba. 5th Annual Hispanic Studies Symposium, Monash University, Melbourne. Nov 24, 2006.
• ‘Hate Crimes and Heteronormativity: The Politics of “Male” Space and Gendered Violence in a Global Setting’. Building Bridges: Gathering of Solidarity with Latin America and the Asia-Pacific, Trades Hall, Melbourne. Oct 21-22, 2006.
• ‘Crimes of Inhumanity: State Institutions and Cultural-legal Discourse as Perpetrators of Violence Against Gender Variant/Transgender People in Latin America’. Crime, Violence and Gendered Identities. 4th Annual Hispanic Studies Symposium, Monash University, Melbourne. May 13, 2005.

• Secretary and Member of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA)
• Book review editor for the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research ~ JILAR
• Member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)