Author: Maria Mercedes Carrion PhD

This week we considered the ways in which artists such as screenwriters and performance artists represent femicide, sex trafficking, violence, and embodiment in media and Performance Art.  Their questions about gender, mysoginy, disparity, strength, weakness, and violence against the female body in television, film, and on areas of performance art such as body art and earth… Continue reading Nov. 8-10. Arts of Writing. Femicide, sex trafficking, violence, media, and Performance Art

This week we considered contradictory angles of the work of raperas or rapping latinas and their ties (or lack thererof) to religion: repression of sexuality, divinity, ritual, congregation, being a mujer pública vs being a virgen, gender disparities, talking back, dealing with overwhelming masculinist presences. The links to music videos by Nira Clandestine, Macha Colón, and Becky… Continue reading Nov 1-3. Rapping Latinas

This week we discussed the importance of hope, spirit, and care in the processes of healing and recovering bodies from violence, rape, annihilation, humiliation, and denigration, and we considered the potential submissive dimensions of hope, spirit, and care in those precise same processes. On Monday we discussed Greenwood and Delgado’s article on fitness and spirituality,… Continue reading Oct. 25-27. Recovering Bodies.

This short week we discussed the concept of transnational, its matters, and how they matter to gain a better understanding of Latinas and Religion. In our discussion we considered the significance and meaning of transnational matters to understand the correspondences between Latinas and Religion, and each one of you discussed with several partners what would… Continue reading Oct. 13. Transnational Matters

This week we discussed what it means to walk the broken paths of home, homeland, and homeland security that turn upside down all we have learned until now.  The strength and purity of blood, honor, lineage, healing, and so on that we have seen and aprehended become bloody, violent, and deadly, especially for mothers, as… Continue reading Oct. 4-6. Home, Homeland, Homeland Security

This week we worked on new understandings of the importance of geopolitical negotiations in the constitution of Latina bodies and their exercise of devotion.  Looking at three vastly different, yet interrelated cases (the mobile devotion of guadalupanas, spirit possession in the Venezuelan cult of María Lionza, and the various branches of affiliation and love towards… Continue reading Sept. 28-30. Migration and Devotion

This week we discussed various corresponding ways in which gender, health, healing, race, and the environment correspond with each other in latinidad.  We examine two guiding Latina figures rarely associated with the institution of marriage, because they are reigning goddess of heavens and earth, and in more ways than one, mothers virginal and almighty: Afro-Cuban… Continue reading Sept. 20-22. In Sickness, In Health

This week’s readings and discussions focused on a better understanding of the correspondences between honor and blood, and how these two signs, materials, and events interact with the constitution of latina bodies and with religion.  We expanded the discussion we began the past two weeks regarding the meaningful network of bodies, flesh, ethnicity, and religion,… Continue reading Sept. 12-14. Blood and Honor

This short week we sought to understand the myriad roles that bodies and embodiment play in the study of Latinas and Religion, and what are some critical terms and new methods to engage flesh, the body, sinfulness, and new readings of these matters.  To that end, we dwelled on a theoretical journey on flesh, and… Continue reading Sept. 8. Fleshing Bodies

This week we focused on thinking how latinidad (as ethnicity and identity) corresponds with gendered and religious identity.  We discussed various terms of engagement of this correspondence, such as comunidad, machismo, marianismo, en conjunto, and womanist theology / teología mujerista, among others. We sought to understand and read competently the ways in which religion, gender, and ethnicity/identity… Continue reading Aug. 30-Sept. 1. Latinas, Latinos, and Religion