RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Material Regimes: Gender, Architecture, and Biopolitics in Latin American Cultures

Project Title: Material Regimes: Gender, Architecture, and Biopolitics in Latin American Cultures
PI: Carlos Halaburda
Award Type: 1-Year IIRP-Based
Department: RLL
Division/School: Arts & Humanities
Start Year: 2026
Description:

This collaborative project brings together three scholars working on different historical periods of Latin American cultural production to examine a shared question: how have space and material objects participated in the production, regulation, and transformation of gendered and sexual regimes from the early modern colonial period to the modern era? Spanning the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, our research investigates how material and spatial forms, including narrative topologies, urban interiors, architectural settings, and everyday objects have functioned as active agents in shaping gendered subjectivities and legitimizing regimes of power and violence. By placing early modern Hispanic epic poetry, Argentine modernist and realist literature, and twentieth-century queer and trans material cultures into dialogue, we develop a transhistorical framework for understanding the gendered politics of space and materiality across imperial and postcolonial contexts. The month-long residency at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris will provide the setting for collaborative theorization, structured workshops, and the development of shared publications that articulate this transhistorical approach.