Kadiri J Vaquer Fernandez
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Visiting Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
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Kadiri is interested in postcolonial, performance, gender, queer, and cultural studies. Most of her research examines cultural artifacts--music, street art, murals, literature--generated by the Spanish speaking Caribbean communities and their diasporas during the XX and XXI Century. Broadly speaking, her dissertation focuses on provocation as a rhetorical and artistic device employed by marginalized communities--or cultural agents representing them--in order to gain visibility and agency. More specifically, she argues that after the 70s, Puerto Rican artists and cultural agents (from a broad spectrum of mediums) have relied on provocative aesthetics to draw attention to a general sense of social malaise related to homophobia, gender-based violence, colonialism and U.S. intervention, and to challenge the dominant national rhetoric.