The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity

María Elena Cepeda is Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and faculty affiliate in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Williams College, where she focuses on intersectional approaches to Latina/o/x media and popular culture and US Colombian Studies. Cepeda is the author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the “Latin Music Boom” (NYU Press) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media (Routledge). Her more recent writing has appeared in publications such as Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Latino Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Cepeda’s commentary on popular culture and media has been featured on US media outlets including National Public Radio, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. She is currently at work on a hybrid memoir/academic text, tentatively titled Never a Local: Gender, Migration, Madness, that examines the interplay of gender, race, media and mental disability in her Colombian family’s migration story.