Jay Sosa

Affiliation: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies

Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Jay Sosa is an anthropologist and queer studies scholar. His research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality politics in the Americas, with an emphasis on the connections between state policy, public culture, and activism.

His first book, Sex War Aesthetics: LGBT Activism and Backlash Politics in Brazil (in progress) examines how sexual human rights cultures transformed over Brazil’s turbulent decade in the 2010s. The book analyzes Brazil’s transforming political culture in debates over LGBT rights extending across Brazilian political and public life––court cases, legislative campaigns, news coverage of violent crime, and television melodrama. He has also written about street protest, political sexism, and the production of hate crime statistics.

Sosa is also currently researching the history of the U.S. butyl nitrite [poppers] industry, examining how poppers enabled new erotic orientations and played key roles in the sexual revolution, gay power, the early AIDS crisis, and contemporary queer pop culture. Drawing on archives and interviews, the project examines how producers, consumers, and regulators have experienced and categorized nitrites.

Sosa is the former co-chair for the Association of Queer Anthropology, and his research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, the Mellon Foundation, The Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

Articles and Book Chapters:

2022 “Epistemic Doubt and Affective Certainty: Counting Homotransphobia in Brazil.” [Forthcoming in Theory and Society].

2022 “Keyword: Backlash.” [Forthcoming in Feminist Anthropology].

2021 “ ‘Gays Have Taken the Paulista!’: Queer Protest and Placemaking in São Paulo.” Journal of Global South Studies. 38(1). 168-193.

2021 “Experimental Urbanity in São Paulo." (Co-written with Aiala Levy and Daniel Gough). Journal of Global South Studies. 38(1). 1-24.

2020 “Choreographing Exclusions: Race, Place and Protest in São Paulo.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 15(3). 225-235.

2019 "Subversive, Mother, Kill Joy: The Brazilian Right's Case Against Dilma Rousseff." Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society. 44(3). 717-741.

2014 “‘Marijuana is a Crime, But Homophobia is Just Fine:’ The Scandalous Logics of Queer Solidarity.” in Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms. London: Peter Lang. 215-236.

Other Writing:

2020 Review of Leticia Alvarado (2018). Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production. Visual Studies. 10.1080/1472586X.2020.1741938

2019 Review of Erica Robb Larkins. 2015. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. University of California Press. Urbanities: Journal of Urban Ethnography. 9(1). 112-114.

2019 "Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976." Entry for Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts. Joachim Hochman, ed. New York: Del Monico-Prestel. 174-175.

2018 "Rites of Participation: Popular Encounters and Democratic Ritual in Brazil." Review of Victor Albert's The Limits to Citizen Power. In Anthropology Book Forum. Available online.

2017 “Whose Secularity?” Anthropology News website, November 22, 2017.

2016 Review of Vinodh Venkatesh's The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. In Masculinities Journal. 6.

2014 "A Tale of Two Rios: Urbanization and Displacement in Brazil." Latin America/Chicago: Newsletter for the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. pp. 3-4.

2014 "Sex Politics Between Anticolonialism and Human Security." Review of Paul Amar's The Security Archipelago and Scott Morgensen's Spaces Betw

Education

PhD, University of Chicago
MA, University of Chicago
BA, University of Michigan

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Jay Sosa

Selected Publications

Education