Valeria Villegas Lindvall
Om Valeria Villegas Lindvall
In the summer of 2013, I obtained a Master’s Degree in Cinema Studies from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. My thesis, titled El mero chingón. Mexicanness at large (available in DiVA), focuses on the portrayal of Mexicanness as an identity discourse and its transformation through narco narratives in film, television and music. I approach the figure of the chingón (drug dealer) mostly through exploitation features and locate the melodramatic logics of narco film and music as vital for the construction of the modern notion of the Mexican drug dealer as an incarnation of contemporary and contradictory Mexicanness.
After graduating from the University of Stockholm, I returned to Mexico and worked as a lecturer at the Communication and Digital Art Department at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México, from autumn 2013 to autumn 2015. I devised the syllabus and lectures for Aesthetics and Aesthetics for Digital and Interactive Media, courses taught on a weekly basis and entirely in English, that aimed to foster critical thought and its application in debate and analysis regarding media products.
Parallel to my academic career, I have collaborated at diverse publications, most prominently as co-editor and music journalist at Rolling Stone Mexico. My work was published in this music and popular culture magazine from the beginning of 2010 to late 2016, as I also partook of the process of crafting the monthly issues and developing exciting ideas and contents for specialized collectible issues. I have also covered music festivals in Mexico and the United States and interviewed figures that include Yoko Ono, Annie Leibovitz, Annie Clark and Shirley Manson, among many more. I am currently a part of the editorial board of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, founded by Dr. Anna Backman Rogers and Dr. Anna Misiak, a peer reviewed, open access journal hosted at the University of Gothenburg.
Currently, I’m working on my PhD dissertation, supervised by Dr. Anna Backman Rogers and Prof. David Martin Jones. I have presented my work in Mexico, Estonia, Sweden, England and Scotland.
My project focuses on the portrayal of the female figures in Latin American horror film in order to bring a feminist focus to the understanding of the horrific. I draw from the larger frame of the Latin American exotic as monstrous and aim to examine the ways in which race, gender and class, among other intersections, inform and shape the depiction of the monstrous woman, mostly in features produced in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. My purpose is to argue for the importance of a more encompassing understanding of the inequalities of power that give place to portrayals that can otherize, exoticize and make a monster out of the Latin American female body but can also hold the key to writing counternarratives by repurposing tropes such as the witch and the shewolf.
My work has been published in Grim Magazine, Screen Queens and as a part of the blog series from Sheffield Gothic (University of Sheffield). Most recently, I have published the article The flying uterus: from abjection to divinity in The Book of Birdie (2016) in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.
[FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS] “Gigi Saul Guerrero and her Latin American Female Monsters” in Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism and Genre, ed. Alison Peirse (Rutgers University Press, 2020)
"Cam. Alice’s Looking Glass in the 21st Century” in Screen Bodies in the Digital Age: Essays on Voyeurism, Violence and Power, edited by Dr. Susan Flynn (McFarland, 2020).