Alejandro Múnera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Critical Theory Program. In 2023, Alejandro was an Erasmus Fellow at the Lateinamerika-Institute from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
His research traverses modern literature, film and media, visual art, and critical theory from Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean, mainly focusing on queer, trans, and feminist culture; disease and disability studies; and the genealogies of black, indigenous, and LGBT social movements in the Americas.
Alejandro’s dissertation, Vital Signs: Micropolitics of Liberation and the HIV/AIDS Crisis in Latin America, interrogates the ethics and aesthetics of representing illness and disease through various media, including literature, photography, contemporary art, performance, and documentary film. By designing another topography of understudied end-of-the-century artists, activists, intellectuals, and theoreticians such as León Zuleta, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Fernando Arias, Felix Ángel, Leila Míccolis, Lorenzo Jaramillo, Herbert Daniel, and Darcy Penteado, Vital Signs investigates a set of political and cultural transitions in Colombia and Brazil by engaging with the minoritarian archives of (homo)sexual liberation from the 1970s in addition to the biomedical materialities and opacities brought about by the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the rise of neoliberalism. Located at the intersections between queer and crip theory, media theory, and psychoanalytic theory, this interdisciplinary study seeks to elaborate on the psychic, phenomenological and biopolitical implications of representing the experience of illness and disability, and the ethical scenarios we embody and perform onto the marginalized Other when regarding their experience as an (in)capacited body.
Alejandro’s poetry has been featured in Como la flor. Voces de la poesía cuir colombiana contemporánea (Planeta, 2021).
