Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Social Mediated Latinas: Creating and Contouring Digital Latina Looks in the Twenty-First Century documents how new forms of Latina celebrity, media viewership, and cultural critique emerged in the twenty-first century with the onset of entertainment streaming platforms, online subcultures, and the social media influencer industry on the internet. Latinas with internet access used their social media presence to create original content and to participate in conversations related to media representation's impacts on Latina identity in the United States. They utilize the participatory affordances of various digital platforms—such as hashtags, direct messaging, and video editor studios—to post to their personal social media accounts and interact with other users' content online. In doing so, Latinas act as cultural producers whose online activity builds on existing mass media depictions of Latinas while simultaneously interrogating the star marketing strategies, beauty standards, and stereotyped narratives that U.S. legacy media industries have projected onto them. This project uses a combined approach of content, reception, production, and star persona analysis to examine the social media posts related to Latina representation that are produced, viewed, and responded to by U.S.-based Latina cultural producers on the internet. I recognize the 2010s to be the decade when many Latinas utilized the media production and social networking capabilities of sites like YouTube and TikTok to transform themselves into what I define as Social Mediated Latinas: creators of digital content who, in their self-reflexive posts and public discourse, emphasize their ethnoracial identity as an integral part of how they make, view, and critique Latina representation. I survey how three types of Social Mediated Latinas—Internet celebrities, traditional celebrities, and comics creators—foreground their ethnoracial identity on the internet in ways that complicate the legacies of Latina star (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Frederick Aldama (Committee Co-Chair); Jian Chen (Committee Co-Chair); Paloma Martinez-Cruz (Committee Member); Guisela Latorre (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Hispanic Americans; Literature; Mass Media; Web Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Spanish and Portuguese

Anchored in Latino Critical Race Theory, this project analyzes undocumented Latinx narratives across theater, comics, memoir, and music as decolonial cultural production and counter-storytelling. It investigates how each form is used to build affective ties with audiences, call on them to reflect on their own positionality, and imagine new social realities. This is accomplished by simulating the violence of deportation and positioning undocumented communities as foundational to building networks of support and resistance. The works examined here rely on surrogates to publicize and justify everyday undocumented disobedience that otherwise would not be shared for fear of deportation. Critically reading these texts in educational settings is urgently needed to decolonize multicultural approaches that include Latinx literature in apolitical and celebratory ways. Moreover, attending to the diverse and, at times, contradictory perspectives and approaches to social transformation found across these works positions undocumented communities as dynamic social agents that draw on a wide variety of ways to forge a politics of possibility.

Committee: Paloma Martinez-Cruz (Committee Chair); Frederick Luis Aldama (Committee Member); Ana Elena Puga (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Hispanic Americans; Latin American Studies; Literature; Political Science; Teaching; Theater