Sandra Soto

Sandra K. Soto is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She holds a PhD in English, with a focus in Ethnic and Third World Literature, from the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire (2010), replaces the race-based oppositional paradigm of Chicano literary studies with a less didactic, more flexible, framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests are in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Feeling Greater Mexico, which mobilizes queer theories of affect to pursue unlikely connections between critical transnational studies and U.S. ethnic studies. In 2010 she and Miranda Joseph received the National Education Association Excellence in the Academy Award in Democracy in Higher Education for their essay “Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona.” At the University of Arizona, she is an Executive Committee Member of the Institute of LGBT Studies and an affiliate of English, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Mexican American Studies and Research Center.

Research Interests:  Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, queer theory, racialized sexuality; transnational feminisms