Main content start
Honors Theses

Recuerdos: Queer Central American Identity Formation in/through Photography

Author Full Name
Kevin Calderon
2022

Faculty Advisor:

Jonathan Rosa, Graduate School of Education

Secondary Reader: 

Jerome Reyes, Institute for the Diversity in the Arts 

Graduate Student Advisor:

Nestor Silva, Department of Anthropology 

Abstract: 

What does it mean to be a Queer Central American? This photo exhibition is an elevation of my family’s personal photography as part of a transnational, intergenerational journey in/through Queerness. Being Central American is already fraught with colonial and imperial trauma; US imperialism and the dispossession of land from Campesinos, nation-states that employ a culture of fear and silencing to further their political projects, and a culture that centers religiosity with oftentimes anti-Queer/Trans sentiment/social structures. Put into conversation with my own photography of Queer Central Americans, I ask us to complicate our understandings of Diaspora, Family, and what it looks like to be Queer Central American today by applying Queer framework of orientation and using photography as a mode of analysis.

View final Honors Thesis here.