Queer Minicon
Join us for this year’s Queer MiniCon centering themes of futurity and resilience in times of crisis.
This year’s Queer MiniCon will be a one-day virtual conference showcasing outstanding UNC undergraduate and graduate research in queer studies during the afternoon of April 8th. It will consist of two panels and a keynote address.
Our Keynote speaker is Dr. Eddy Alvarez: “Sequined Routes and Movements: Queer and Trans Latinx Pasts and Futures”
Merging scholarly research, creative nonfiction, performance and reflection, this presentation is an offering to queer and trans Latinx lives and memories. Drawing on personal and collective memories and histories, physical and ephemeral archives, and analysis of popular culture and aesthetic, this talk maps and honors multiple and intertwining routes, journeys, and movimientos taken by families, activists, artists, scholars, healers, and more, as they “find sequins in the rubble” while imagining different pasts and futures.
BIO: Dr. Alvarez Jr. is a first-generation college student and a former elementary school teacher. An interdisciplinary scholar, he obtained an B.A. and M.A. in Spanish from California State University, Northridge, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include Chicanx and Latinx aesthetics, performance, and popular culture, Queer oral histories, Los Angeles queer Latinx histories, Queer of color theories, Jotería Studies, Jotería pedagogies, Queer Space, Feminist geographies, Sound Studies, and Critical Fat Studies. His academic and creative work has been published in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Revista Bilingüe/Bilingual Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog. He is one of the co-editors of Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces published in 2021. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript titled Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Memory, Space and Aesthetics in Queer Latinx Los Angeles, an oral history and archival project which maps physical and ephemeral sites of memory and quotidian moments of pleasure and resistance for queer and trans Chicanx and Latinx communities in LA. He is also working on a book of essays and poems about growing up queer in a Cuban and Mexican family in the San Fernando Valley. Prior to joining CSU Fullerton, he held a joint appointment in the Departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and University Studies at Portland State University. Before his time in Portland, he taught in the department of Africana and Latino Studies at State University of New York, Oneonta. A founding member of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship, he has served on the board of the organization as Co-chair elect, Co-chair, and Ex-officio Co-chair, and co-coordinated the 2019 biennial national conference at Portland State University. He is a 2021 New Leadership Academy Faculty Fellow, a 2020 Faculty Fellow for the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, and Honor 41, an LGBTQ Latinx organization, named him one of The 41 List 2019-2020 Honorees, highlighting him as a Latinx LGBTQ role model.