Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan and 2018 LSA Collegiate Fellow (Women's and Gender Studies)
About
Dr. Bolivar is a cultural anthropologist whose current project, "'Somos una Fantasia': Race, Violence, and Potentiality in Transgender Latina Sexual Economies of Labor" examines the experiences of sex working transgender Latinas in the Chicago metropolitan area. Dr. Bolivar offers a new analytical framework, "fantasia" for understanding how transgender Latinas are racialized and sexualized in sexual economies of labor and the US nation more broadly. "Fantasia" also indexes the ephemeral presence of these women in the United States — they are always at risk of disappearing. Yet this analytic also encompasses forms of queer potentiality — trans Latinas use their bodies to produce resistant forms of labor, care, kinship, and space-making.
She is an inductee into the Edward Bouchet Honor Society, and a board member of the Association of Latinx Anthropologists. Both organizations work to support people of color and other underrepresented individuals in academia.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Latinx studies, transgender studies, women of color feminism(s), queer of color critique, histories of gender and sexuality, sexual labor
