Laura G. Gutiérrez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her primary research and teaching areas of interest are: Latin American, Mexican and Latina/o embodied practices, gender and sexuality, and questions of nation, modernity and the transnational. Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (U Texas P, 2010), which won The Ninth Annual MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies.
Gutiérrez has published essays and book chapters in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Culture Studies, Transformations, Spectator, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Latin American Literary Review, Feminist Media Studies, Global Mexican Cultural Productions, Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities.
Currently, in addition to completing several essays on Latina/o performance and cabaret performance in the Americas, Gutiérrez’s research and writing includes two book-length projects. The first is a book on the primary figures of rumbera cinema, tentatively entitled Rumberas in Motion (Pictures): Transnational Movements in the Archive of Mexican ‘Classic’ Cinema. The book examines dance and other corporeal movements to think through the ways in which embodied performances in popular cultural forms (B movies to be precise) are producing ideas about gender, sexuality, and blackness. The second book in progress is a history of political cabaret culture in Mexico City. It specifically focuses on the ways in which political cabaret as a live artistic expression has existed and continues to exist alongside (and in some cases despite) the different moments of Mexican political history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Gutiérrez received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has had teaching appointments at the University of Iowa and the University of Arizona. Gutiérrez’s research and writing has been supported by a César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellowship from the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona and a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Humanities, “Sex, Race & Globalization Project” at the University of Arizona. Gutiérrez is on the Board of Advisors of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and on the Editorial Boards of Feminist Formations and Estudios de Género (El Colegio de México). She holds affiliate appointments in the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also a faculty associate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and has served on its Executive Committee (2015-2017).