LATINA/X
Feminisms

Laura E. Pérez is an associate professor and graduate advisor of the doctoral program in the Department of Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is also a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Women’s Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies.  She has served as the Coordinator of the Program in Chicana/o Latina/o Studies twice, and directed the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group on Gender.  Her research and teaching focus on post-sixties U.S. Latina/o literary, visual, and performance arts; “U.S. women of color” (aka “third world”) feminist and queer thought; art and spirituality; racialization and the cultural politics and economics of the artworld(s); and theories of oppositionality and decolonization.  She is the author of Chicana Art:  The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke UP 2007).   Her essays on Latina/o spirituality have appeared in Decolonial Voices: Chicana/os Studies in the 21st Century (Aldama and Quiñonez 2002), Latino/as in the World-System:  Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire (Grosfoguel et al. 2006), Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity (De la Torre and Espinosa 2006),  Mexican American Religions:  Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (Espinosa and García 2008), and Rhetorics of the Americas, 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (Baca and Villanueva 2009).  In spring of 2009, she co-curated the art exhibition Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas, at the 516 Gallery, in Albuquerque.  She is at present co-editing The@-Erotics:  Decolonizing Sex and Spiritualities in the Latin@Americas and at work on a new book on U.S. women of color queer feminism, decolonizing spiritualities, and non-violence.