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Kristie Soares is Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies. They are also a performance artist. Both their performance work and their research explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. They earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BA in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Florida.

Professor Soares’ book,Ìý (University of Illinois Press, 2023), argues that joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stori