Alejandro Múnera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Critical Theory Program. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Alejandro was an Erasmus Fellow at the Lateinamerika-Institute from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary literature, 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 titled “Vital Signs: The Aesthetics of Sexual Politics in Latin America” explores the literary and visual practices advanced by countercultural social movements for sexual liberation in Colombia and Brazil in the 1970s and 80s. In dialogue with queer studies, “Vital Signs” surveys how everyday objects were transformed into disruptive and paradigmatic queer forms whose semiotic commitments reorganized the contours separating life, politics, and art. It does so by examining an unruly array of interventions in the public sphere, such as self-publicized literature, photographic practices, passed-around pamphlets, ephemeral journals, and comics, elucidating how queer and feminist artists, activists, and writers generated minor radical objects to reframe sexuality’s political potential in the wake of crucial democratic transitions taking place in Colombia and Brazil between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s.
Alejandro’s poetry has been featured in Como la flor. Voces de la poesía cuir colombiana contemporánea (Planeta, 2021).
Courses offered
“Latin American Contemporary Fiction” (Summer 2024)
“Latin American Countercultures and Alternative Social Movements” (Spring 2024)
“Queer Aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean” (Spring 2021)
