Biography: Tace Hedrick’s research is centered on two areas: United States Latinx/Chicanx and Latin American Studies focusing especially on intellectual history; and popular genre studies, focusing a feminist and Latinx Studies lens on Latina/Chicana “chica lit” (popular fiction written by Latina authors about twenty- to thirty-something Latinas) and Latina/Chicana gothic romance. She has recently written an essay on the discourse of eugenics in Silvia Moreno-García’s 2020 gothic horror novel Mexican Gothic.
Her current book project is tentatively called “The Cosmic Race: Spirituality, Sexuality, and Race in New Age Latin/x America, 1968-2010.” Here, I read the work of Chicanx feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Puerto Rican television astrologist Walter Mercado, and Cuban American conceptual artist Ana Mendieta through a long twentieth century of exchanges between Latin American and United States Latinx/Chicanx spiritual belief systems. This project looks at a long twentieth-century history of how notions of race and sexuality were both shaped and filtered through Latin American, and later United States Latinx, receptions of spiritual belief systems in what is now often called New Age, manifest themselves in the ways Latinx/Chicanx artists and writers have re-imagined racialized and sexualized images and ideas from the late 1960s forward.
Recent and Future Talks:
“The Gothic and Politicized Narrative in Silvia Moreno-García’s Mexican Gothic.” Latinx Visions, March 9-11, 2023.
”Pain and Healing in Gloria Anzaldúa’s New Age Psychology.” Latinx Studies Association, University of Arizona, Tempe April 17-20, 2024
Publications, Submitted and Forthcoming:
Submitted: “’Loving Blackness’: Empathy as Critical Consciousness in the Work of bell hooks.” Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature. Edited by Roy, Arnab and Shailen Mishra. Journal of World Literature.
Submitted: “What Makes a Mestiza Desirable? Desire and the Juxtapolitical Gothic in Silvia Moreno-García’s Mexican Gothic.” Latinx Visions: Speculative Worlds in Latinx Literature, Art, and Performance. Edited by Matthew Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Taylor, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez.
Forthcoming: Hedrick, Tace. “’Their Walmart Polyester Pants Smell Like Tamales’: Chica Lit and the Politics of Latinx Social Mobility.” American Fury: Essays on Moral Outrage in Culture and Politics. Edited by Myra Mendible. McFarland, February 2024.
Publications, Peer Reviewed:
“’The Spirits Talk to Us’: Regionalism, Poverty, and Romance in Mexican-American Gothic Fiction.” Studies in the Novel. 49.3 (Fall 2017): 322-340.
Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-first Century. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
“Teaching Matters of Class and Style with Chica Lit.” Latina/o Literature in the Classroom: 21st Century Approaches to Teaching. Edited by Frederick Aldama. New York, NY: Routledge University Press. 2015. 202-217.
“History is What Hurts: Queer Temporalities and Alien Feelings in Gloria Anzaldúa.” Cultural History. Special Issue. Edited by Gregory Smithers. 4.1 (2015): 64-86.
Contact
- office: Turlington 4326
- voice: (352) 273-0390
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- email: tace@ufl.edu