Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

My main research interests are theater and performance studies, queer/LGBT Hispanic Caribbean (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican) studies and U.S. Latina/o and Latin American literary, cultural, and performance studies. In my first book, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), I analyze portrayals of migration, sexual diversity, and gender nonconformity in Puerto Rican cultural productions (such as cartoons, dance theater, film, literature, and performance art) both on the island and in the United States, focusing on the lives and work of artists such as Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, Arthur Avilés, and Elizabeth Marrero. In my more recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), I focus on drag and trans performance and argue that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, diasporic displacements and reenactments of home, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and anti-Black prejudice. Here I discuss the lives and work of artists and activists such as Nina Flowers, Jorge Steven López Mercado, Kevin Fret, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Sylvia Rivera, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Lady Catiria, and Barbara Herr, as well as Puerto Rican participation in RuPaul’s Drag Race. I also look at documentary films such as Mala Mala (2014, dir. Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles) and at the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret. Translocas received the 2021 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY); an honorable mention for the 2022 Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA); and the 2023 University of Michigan Press Book Award.

Currently, I am working on a book on contemporary performance in Puerto Rico and am writing on artists such as Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Awilda Rodríguez Lora ("La Performera"), Gisela Rosario (Macha Colón), Eduardo Alegría, and Mickey Negrón. I have also continued to publish on additional transloca performers such as Walter Mercado and Fausto Fernós.

I have served on the board of directors of the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (www.clags.org), on the Modern Language Association's Committee on the Literatures of People of Color of the United States and Canada (www.mla.org), and on the Executive Committee of the MLA's Puerto Rican Literature and Culture Discussion Group (2001-05). I was the chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Section (now known as the Sexualities Studies Section) of the Latin American Studies Association (2003-04). I am also a member of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (https://www.ricanstudies.com/), the American Studies Association, and the Caribbean Studies Association.