Gwendolen Pare

Gwendolen Pare (PhD University of California-Irvine, 2024) is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean culture and critical theory. Her dissertation book project, Care Beyond Cure, brings Latin American and Afro-Caribbean poetry and literature in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Creole/Nation Language into dialogue to show how dissident, contagious, and even violent forms of care emerge in the absence of cure. If leading theorists of Latin American studies have shown the baroque ethos of modernity to be a Latin American contribution to studying modernity and imagining it otherwise, then Care beyond Cure explores the role that care plays in studying and imagining alternative modernities. In doing so, the book project argues that care is a gendered and undervalued labor but also a work with language which educates us in minor, interdependent, and contestatory forms of being.

Collaborative work has been formative for Pare's scholarship. Among other collaborations, in 2020 Pare received the UCHRI collaborative research award for the project, Performance in the Wake | Cuerpas ante lo político, in which hemispheric performances became interlocutors for the challenges the Humanities’ arguably face today. Together with collaborators Elena Cardona, Isabella Vergara, and Mell Rivera Díaz, she published this work in Liminalities.

As a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies department (2024-26), Pare teaches courses in feminist science and technology studies and on femme and dissident sexualities in the arts and literature of the Américas. She is also working on her second research project, Viral Feminisms, in which she examines how viral media transform conventional understandings of gender and sexuality, and how, vice versa, viral feminisms challenge universalist histories of media and technology from Latin America and the Caribbean.