Description: How do queers of color develop reliable knowledge about their lives and political possibilities despite being subject to the ideological violence of racist and homophobic societies? What importance do we attribute to the creative and subjective strategies queers of color employ to resist such violence and to negotiate levels of intelligibility, and what are the implications of such interventions for social theory?
Bio: Ernesto Javier Martinez is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. He is an interdisciplinary literary critic interested in the ways that racial and sexual minorities in the United States acquire and produce knowledge in oppressive contexts. His research has been published in journals such as PMLA, Signs, Aztlán, and the International Journal of Diversity. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford University Press, 2013). He is also the co-editor of two volumes: Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2011) and The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education (Palgrave, forthcoming 2014).