Antonio Viego
Assistant Professor of Literature & Romance Studies
5pm
About the Speaker
Antonio Viego received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He has written essays on Chicana/o video and film, contemporary lesbian and gay Chicana/o & Latina/o literatures and Chicana feminist theory. He teaches courses on Cuban-American literature, Chicana/o & Latina/o cultural studies, queer ethnic studies and lesbian and gay theory. He is currently completing a book entitled, The Unconscious of Latinidad . In it he claims that the constructions of ethnic, racial and sexual identities in legal discourse as well as the political and social movements organized around these categories in the U.S. must be studied in relation to the history of ego psychology and the distortion of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in the U.S. The book argues that unless we attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical.