University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies / Staff / Academic Staff

Dr Vek Lewis

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

Part of my research focuses on representations of sexual minorities, marginalised groups and urban life in contemporary Latin American cultural production. I’m mainly a scholar located in Mexican Studies, although I have interests related to Cuba, the Caribbean, Chile and Latinos in the USA. My current work is related to cultural and moral spatialities, human movement, geopolitics and the work of institutions in regulating peoples’ lives. As part of the Sydney University Research Community for Latin America (SURCLA), I am a key participant in a study related to cultural identities and Chilean migration in Sydney which is currently being undertaken.

Feature research will focus on the element of the making and remaking of sexuality in the migration experience among Latin American origin people in the LGBT community here in Sydney. Via individual interviews and select focus groups, data will be gathered and subject to narrative analysis, informed by contemporary work on ‘sexual’ migrations and Latino/as.

Although I started as a cultural studies scholar looking at literary and non-literary texts, I am more and more moving into social research and methods, to try and connect my political interests with a scholarship that might work for social change. In this respect, I am inspired by Participant Action Research and Institutional Ethnography in particular.

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

Research areas

  • Contemporary Latin American literature
  • 20th and 21st Century Latin American cinema
  • Gender, Sexuality and Postcolonial Studies
  • Mass media representations
  • Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Studies
  • Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
  • Human rights and social movements

Current projects

  • Transfigurations: Visions of Sex/Gender Variance in Contemporary Latin American Culture (under review). This is a book that arose from my PhD. It offers an analysis of cultural representations of homosexuality and ‘transgenderism’ in Latin American texts and contexts, drawing on a wide array of sociological analysis to understand the way those who are different because of their sexuality and/or gender are envisioned in literary and filmic works.
  • Forging ‘moral geographies’: state wide tensions in the spatial politics of border towns. I examine the shaping of the 'moral geographies' (Smith 2000) – under the dual force of the law and the media – of Tecate, a small Baja California border town. In the period examined (2002-2004), Tecate's own sense of community was one that articulated the more sizeable but close-by border town of Tijuana as an abject other. Travestis (male born people who live in feminine mode) were spoken of by town councilmen involved in proposing and approving a new municipal law against them as a threat to the town's 'manliness', to its 'children' and ‘families’. The rationale posited by the then governor, Juan Vargas Rodríguez, was one that envisioned the movement of 'men dressed as women' as an incursion into the social body that presented health and security concerns.
Back to Top

Selected publications

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.) April, 2009.
  • ‘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.
Back to Top

Areas of teaching and research supervision

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

Supervision - Current Candidates

PhD candidate:

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

Honours (in 2009):

  • 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 insecurities of the mediatised everyday.
  • A comparative look at Egyptian and Mexican social movements (shared with Arabic and Islamic Studies).
Back to Top

Conference activity

  • ‘The Construction of the “Social Problem” of Travestis in Tecate, Baja California’. Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities, California State University, L.A., U.S.A., February 26, 2009. [Guest lecture]
  • ‘Do Political Identities Translate Cross-Culturally? The Case of “Transgender” in Latin America’. Transsexual and transgender bodies: Technological and socio-cultural distinctions between transgender and transsexual experience and meaning making. ISA International Sociological Congress Meetings, Barcelona, Sept. 5-8, 2008.
  • Roundtable - The American-ness of Queer Studies. Panel participant with Dennis Altman and Annamarie Jagose, ANZASA (Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association) Conference, University of Sydney, July 4-7, 2008.
  • ‘Representando/Raptivismo: el hip hop underground en América Latina. Popular Culture/Cultura popular. VIII International AILASA Conference, Monash, Melbourne, July 2-4, 2008.
  • ‘Public Order, Sexual Morality and the Criminalization of Travestis in Mexico’. Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Seminar Series, USYD. 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, May 2, 2008.
  • ‘Not the Subaltern but Political Activist & Institutional Ethnography in Latin America!’ Futures of Latin America, Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, April 16, 2008. [Guest lecture]
  • ‘Beyond Play, Ploy and Performativity: Travestis in Latin American Cinema and Culture’. Image + Nation: le festival international de cinéma lgbt de Montréal, Concordia University, Montreal, November 17, 2007. [Invited and trip paid for by the Canadian Arts Council]
  • ‘Challenging Neoliberalism, the State and Traditional Paradigms: Social Theory as Praxis among Three Marginalised Groups’. LASA 2007: After the Washington Consensus: Collaborative Scholarship for a New América. XXVII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Montreal, Canada, September 7, 2007.
Back to Top

Other professional contributions

  • 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)
Back to Top