About

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a Professor of Spanish, American Culture, Latina/o, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University obtained in 1999. His main research interests include theater and performance studies, queer and LGBT Hispanic Caribbean studies (focusing on Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican cultures), and U.S. Latina/o/x and Latin American literary and cultural studies. La Fountain-Stokes has authored significant works such as 'Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora,' which analyzes portrayals of migration, sexual diversity, and gender nonconformity in Puerto Rican cultural productions both on the island and in the United States, and 'Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance,' which explores drag and trans performance as a means to question gender and sexuality while addressing issues like commodification, diasporic displacement, ethnicity, and anti-Black racism. His research extends to contemporary performance in Puerto Rico, examining artists such as Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, and Mickey Negrón, among others. La Fountain-Stokes has served on various boards and committees, including the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Modern Language Association's committees related to literature and Puerto Rican studies. His work has been recognized with awards such as the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies, the Frank Bonilla Book Award, and the University of Michigan Press Book Award, reflecting his influential contributions to Latina/o and Caribbean cultural and performance studies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Law
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• History
• Criminology
• Art history
• Art

Selected publications

• PROMESA, Anti-colonial Drag, and Diasporic Puerto Rican Trans Revolution

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Queer Politics of Spanglish

  2025-05-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter, originally published in Spanish in Mexico in 2006, presents an early exploration of the challenges of translating the English-language word “queer” into Spanish. I engage some of the debates regarding linguistic purity and Spanglish in the United States to then analyze debates regarding language and sexual transgression during the conquest of Mexico (La Malinche); in the work of the queer Chicana author Gloria E. Anzaldúa and the Texana singer Selena Quintanilla; in the work of the queer Puerto Rican artists Luz María Umpierre, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner; and in the Cuban American television program ¿Qué pasa, U.S.A.? and the work of Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. I propose multilingualism and linguistic “messiness” as essential to Latinx aesthetics, and to the intellectual and emotional reception of these texts. In this sense, the linguistic transgression of Spanglish is intimately linked to the sexual transgression of queerness, especially in Latinx LGBTQ and feminist cultural representations.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Patería</i> and Contemporary Puerto Rican Queer/Trans Performance

  Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism · 2024-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Patería is a Puerto Rican Spanish-language vernacular synonym for “queerness” as a sign of gender and sexual transgression. It invokes stigmatized LGBTQIA+ local language practices that coexist in tension with the modernity, paradoxes, and challenges of other words such as mariconería, locura, and faggotology. Patería signals a universe associated with the condition of being a pato (duck, faggot) or pata (female duck, lesbian, dyke) or even loca (effeminate homosexual, madwoman) and of moving through the codes of gender nonconformity, of inhabiting the realm of other Spanish-language words like maricón (Mary), its diminutive mariquita (ladybug), mariposa (butterfly), and marimacha (a macho Mary). In this keyword essay, the author engages a SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!) manifesto, a column by Karla Claudio-Betancourt, and scholarly pieces on queer language. He also analyzes Macha Colón’s song “Jayá” (2012), Eduardo Alegría’s song “Farifo” (2004), and Villano Antillano’s song “Pájara” (2020).

  PublisherDOI

• Queer DiaspoRican Circuits

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. "Queerness," as such, and its Spanish-language variant "cuir," have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

  PublisherDOI

• Broadway tropical

  Pontos de Interrogação · 2023-12-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A exploração da temática LGBTQIA+ no teatro comercial em Porto Rico nos últimos trinta anos está fortemente marcada pela adaptação e tradução de obras estrangeiras (principalmente estado-unidenses e europeias) e pela influência da televisão. É isto um problema? Fomenta a criação de consciência sobre a experiência LGBTQIA+ e de comunidade, ou fomenta estereótipos? Por que o público gosta tanto destas obras? Neste artigo analiso montagens porto-riquenhas de A Gaiola das Loucas de Jean Poiret e de Os Rapazes da Banda de Mart Crowley e de obras originais com fortes vínculos à televisão por Héctor Méndez, Alexis Sebastián Méndez e Johnny Ray sob a ótica do populismo cênico, uma modalidade que apela ao popular e a um consenso social que pode marcar rupturas mas que à mesma vez não transforma a sociedade de maneira radical. Exploro também o papel de figuras chave como Juan González-Bonilla, argumentando que as traduções e adaptações podem ser um espaço interessante, mas também limitado, e que a televisão em Porto Rico é um espaço sumamente complexo cheio de contradições no referente a questão LGBTQIA+.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P

  Hispanic Review · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Keywords Mexico, Camp, Cursi, Humor, Parody, Homosexuality, Literature, Narrative, Lgbtq, Queer, Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Travesti, Transgender, Homophobia, Brandon P. Bisbey, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes bisbey, brandon p. Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative. SUNY Press, 2022, 252 pp. What is the relationship between humor and homosexuality in contemporary Mexican narrative, and how has it changed, given the notable transformations [End Page 143] in Mexican society regarding LGBTQ rights over the last decades? Brandon P. Bisbey tackles this question with great gusto and critical acumen, discussing a wide range of short stories and novels from the 1940s to the present. He shows a rather complex and at times contradictory panorama, in a social context historically dominated by “the association of male homosexuality with gender nonconformity, which contributed to the reification of a stereotype of homosexual men as effeminate” (1), frequently through the figure of the loca, and the association of “lesbian sexuality with traditionally masculine behaviors” (2), with popular representations and cultural productions in which “the homosexual characters are comic figures who are the targets of satire and ridicule” (1). Engaging scholars as diverse as Robert McKee Irwin, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Emilio Bejel, Vinodh Venkatesh, and Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Bisbey analyzes a rich archive. He examines how writers, some better known, others less, challenge these homophobic and misogynist stereotypes and envision myriad possibilities, subverting humor and transforming it to diverse ends. These can be seen particularly through queer practices such as camp (a type of minoritarian cultural viewpoint that privileges insider knowledge, seen as a postmodern gay sensibility and critical practice) and cursilería (an affectation and at times an ironic nostalgia that is particular to Hispanic contexts). As the author indicates, “In the texts that I read below, I find that the humor used to signal and talk about queerness includes camp (gender-based humor expressing queerness) that is also always cursi (expressing a postcolonial marginality from discourses of modernity)” (8). The critical readings of the literary texts are engaging and sometimes more convincing than others, as at times Bisbey errs on the side of excessive generosity. Nevertheless, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Mexican and Latin American literature and to readers interested in humor as a social practice and in how queer topics are dealt with in Mexico, with important parallels in other Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Between Camp and Cursi has an introduction, five substantive chapters, a conclusion, notes, a list of works cited, and an index. It also includes four images. The straightforward and highly accessible introduction richly engages the scholarly bibliography and provides summaries of the five chapters, which are organized by themes and not in strictly chronological order. All five focus on literary representations of camp and cursilería, mostly by cisgender men but also including some women authors. Bisbey highlights the context of heteronormativity and violence against women in Mexico and the toxic persistence [End Page 144] of bias, stating that “in the interest of challenging these uses of humor that uphold the dominant social structure, the goal of this book is to interrogate how literature uses humor as a queer, decolonial practice” (4). He also identifies the four main scholars he engages: “José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of camp performance as a strategy of disidentification for queers of color in the United States”; “Eve Sedgwick’s call to read camp texts and practices in a way that balances ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ approaches”; and “Lidia Santos and Carlos Monsiváis’s theorizing of cursilería in Latin America, which also balances paranoid social critique with a reparative emphasis on the creative, decolonial possibilities of lo cursi as an aesthetic practice” (4). The key critical move in this book is to read each literary text “in a way that looks to balance paranoid (critical) and reparative (celebratory) approaches” (8), an approach that at times becomes somewhat mechanical but which nonetheless generates very productive interpretations of texts that at times do not seem particularly progressive or that are marked by...

  PublisherDOI

• Remembering Jean Franco

  Revista hispánica moderna/Revista hispanica moderna · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Remembering Jean Franco Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes When I applied to graduate school in 1990, I was a very eager undergraduate at Harvard who had also spent a year and a half studying at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. My goal was to continue to hone my expertise in gay and lesbian Latin American literature. I was terrified of yet infinitely attracted to New York City. I still remember trembling as I deposited a token to ride the subway for the first time, well before the existence of MetroCards. How different could it be from São Paulo? Growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I rode buses nonstop, traversing the route from Miramar to Old San Juan, home of numerous bookstores, museums, and cultural institutions; to Santurce to go to the theater; and to Río Piedras for events at the University of Puerto Rico. Living in a city with public transportation, but furthermore one with significant cultural life and a large Puerto Rican population, was always the goal. And when I applied to Columbia, there was no such thing as the Internet, at least not in terms of gaining information about prospective faculty. All we had were printed catalogs with names, which I devoured. This is how I learned about Jean Franco and about what was then called the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now known as the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. And I did not know that Jean Franco was a woman. Gender is tricky, as the feminist philosopher Judith Butler has shown, and names can encapsulate ambiguity. Case in point: I recently served as an external PhD dissertation evaluator at the Université de Montréal, and it turns out that my first name, "Lawrence," is feminine in French, which led to all the formal communications referring to me as "madame" and "l'examinatrice." I must confess that this was not terrible, particularly since, as a gay man, camp humor allows for all sorts of negotiations, and I have been performing in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010. I don't know if Jean ever saw me in drag, but she certainly knew I was gay! But the truth is that when I am "Larry" or "Lawrence," I tend to think of myself in the masculine. And to my enormous fortune, Jean was not only a woman, but a feminist, and one radically committed to LGBTQ matters, who was able to introduce me and all her students to some of the most brilliant minds in Latin American thought, whether it was in her graduate seminar on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (an entire semester!), where I ended up writing a research paper on representations [End Page 205] of race (indigeneity and blackness) in Sor Juana's villancicos, or in a class on Latin American popular culture, where I wrote a paper on the Puerto Rican rapper Lisa M (a paper that, curiously enough, just appeared thirty years later in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, with significant revisions). And it was in Jean's classes where we first read and then met the Chilean feminist Nelly Richard and learned about the complex performances of the Yeguas del Apocalipsis (which have just made it into the collection at MoMA) and the extraordinary crónicas of Pedro Lemebel. I ended up taking six classes with Jean at Columbia. These ranged from her undergraduate seminar on the films of Luis Buñuel (Jean was, after all, an expert in Mexican studies and was able to seamlessly jump from Buñuel's surrealist origins in Madrid and Paris to his Mexican period and later French experience), to her class on poetry and the nation, where we read Mary Louise Pratt's brilliant 1994 essay on "Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood," which was published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts—for that class, I wrote a paper on the Puerto Rican poet Luis Llorens Torres. I also took Jean's class on women, gender, and Latin American culture, where we read Manuel Ramos Otero's extraordinarily dense short story "Inventario mitológico del cuento" (a queer Puerto Rican reenvisioning of Julio Cort...

  PublisherDOI

• Lisa M, “La primera rapera mujer de Puerto Rico y de Latinoamérica”, and Early 1990s Feminist Puerto Rican Hip-Hop Culture

  Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies · 2023-01-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Before the global ascent of reggaetón, there was rap, and before Ivy Queen, Glory, Natti Natasha, Cardi B, Villano Antillano, and Young Miko, there was Lisa M. This essay is an analysis of Lisa M’s musical career in the context of early 1990s debates about women, rap, and society in Puerto Rico, taking advantage of the increased focus on gender and on Puerto Rican women singers demonstrated by works ranging from Frances R. Aparicio’s Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures to Licia Fiol-Matta’s The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music. I analyse Lisa M’s early musical production, particularly songs from her 1992 album Ahora vengo alborotá, and articles and letters to the editor from 1992 and 1993 in El Nuevo Día and Vea to document popular debates about rap and gender in Puerto Rico. I conclude with some reflections about Lisa M’s coming out of the closet in 2010 and her musical reappearance in 2018.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reescribiendo «la gran familia puertorriqueña»

  HispanismeS · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  La galardonada obra de teatro Las facultades (2007) del dramaturgo puertorriqueño Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya propone una reconfiguración del mito de «la gran familia puertorriqueña» mediada a través de la tecnología, la religión, las capacidades extrasensoriales asociadas a la parapsicología, la violencia y la sexualidad. Adyanthaya reta la visión idealizada de la familia puertorriqueña a través de una experiencia dramática desorientadora que integra avatares de Internet, identidades múltiples, rituales religiosos, castración, incesto, asesinatos y la presencia de un homúnculo (un hombre artificial), en un contexto en el que no sabemos qué es verdad y qué es ilusión.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Brown trans figurations: Rethinking race, gender, and sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx studies

  Latino Studies · 2022 · 59 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nancy Raquel Mirabal

  New York University Press

  4 shared

• Richard Adams

  Cardiff University

  2 shared

• Benjamin Reiss

  2 shared

• Glenn Hendler

  New York University Press

  2 shared

• Lissa Paul

  2 shared

• Cathy J. Schlund‐Vials

  2 shared

• Philip Nel

  New York University Press

  2 shared

• Deborah Vargas

  Universidad de Santiago de Chile

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Latin American and Iberian Cultures

  Columbia University

  1999

• BA, Romance Languages and Literatures

  Harvard University

  1991

Awards & honors

• 2021 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies for Transloc…
• 2022 Frank Bonilla Book Award (Honorable Mention) for Transl…
• 2022 Blanca G. Silvestrini Award, LASA Puerto Rico Section,…
• 2022 Sylvia Molloy Prize for Best Article in the Humanities…
• 2023 University of Michigan Press Book Award for Translocas