Assignment 1: Susana's bio

Hi everyone!
I hope this finds you all well! I'm so excited to be here and to be both working with and learning from all of you! My name is Susana, but please call me Xuxa (pronounced "Shoe-Shah")! I'm originally from Miami, FL where I completed bachelor's in both art history and English literature at Florida International University. At Illinois State University, I completed my master's in English Studies with a focus on children's literature, as well as a certificate in Women and Gender Studies and coursework for the PhD in English Studies. I found at the end of my first year in the PhD program that my interests and research returned time and again to visual constructions of girlhood, childhood, and adolescence, with an especial focus on how groups are marginalized through the reification of culturally constructed concepts of normativized bodies and narratives in children's and adolescent literature and media. I examined and continue to focus on gender performance and cultural constructions of normativity and abjection: what is accepted as the status quo, what isn’t and why, and how does the creation of included and excluded subject positions serve or manipulate an ideological purpose, honing in on the cultural colonialization and disciplinary normativization of idealized and potential subjects deemed queer because of their bodies, orientations, sexes, identifications, and race. 

I'm here at the University of Illinois to begin a PhD in art history where I'll be studying 20th and 21st century American art focusing on Latin American women artists. From surrealists like Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo to conceptual artists like María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Coco Fusco, I am interested in how Latina artists challenge cultural and political gender roles, meditate on and explore racial tension, and problematize transnational identities through the use of their own and, at times, the viewer’s bodies as the subject and even medium of their work. I am especially interested in the Caribbean mulatta artist’s body as a queer space that pulls and pushes against the viewer to challenge their subjectivity through the projection of embodied colonialism, in effect, placing the viewer into a crafted experience of physical appropriation in an attempt to communicate the historic visual and cultural manipulation of the mulatta body. My interests stemmed from not only the threads I've explored throughout my education but my own subject position as a Cuban-American mulatta woman. I am also  both the first generation in my Cuban family born in the United States and also the first generation in my family to pursue a college degree.

For my SPI project, I will be working with Dr. Oscar E. Vázquez to compile a bibliography of readings on modern Latin American Art spanning from 1800 through World War II that will lay the foundations for my dissertation. These readings will help me define the historical and historiographic narratives surrounding Latin American art of this period and help me in identifying 100 monuments (paintings, architecture, sculpture) that have played a dominant role in constructing these historical narratives. I will also be working under the direction of Anne Sautman, Director of Education at the Krannert Art Museum, on educational research projects to enrich museum visitors’ experiences. I will be working two to three days a week helping Professor Sautman organize the educational materials for the museum’s collection, preparing materials for tours and docents, and also preparing materials for young student visitors.

Thanks so much for reading and I'm looking forward to getting to know you all better as the summer goes on! Hope you've all had a great weekend so far and I can't wait for our first seminar together tomorrow!