NCID-1109
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Professor of American Culture, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Spanish and Portuguese Spanish and Portuguese (Columbia University)
About
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Culture and Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a core faculty member and the former director of the Latina/o Studies Program (2011-2016, 2018-19). He teaches courses on Puerto Rican, Hispanic Caribbean, and US Latina/o studies; queer of color studies; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; and theater and performance. He received a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Columbia University (1999), an MA in Spanish (also from Columbia, 1992), and a BA in Hispanic studies from Harvard College (1991), and also studied at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He is the author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), which won the 2021 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. With Deborah R. Vargas and Nancy Raquel Mirabal, he edited Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017).
Current Work
Tropical Precarity: Contemporary Performance in Puerto Rico focuses on the ways contemporary alternative and experimental Puerto Rican performers address domestic violence and violence against women and queer and trans persons, neoliberalism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-disability bias, misogyny, and poverty in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora in a context of precarity caused by the longstanding financial crisis and by natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and pandemics. La Fountain-Stokes analyzes the work of performance artists, musicians, and theater and multimedia directors in Puerto Rico and the diaspora such as Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Eduardo Alegría, Mickey Negrón, Gisela Rosario (“Macha Colón”), and Awilda Rodríguez Lora (“La Performera”), in the framework of queer geography and performance studies, addressing how they create community and survive in adverse conditions.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Culture, Diaspora, performance, Puerto Rico, sexuality, theater, film, television, Literature