CSRC Fellow 2024-25

Nidia Bautista, PhD Candidate

Nidia Bautista is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA and a CSRC IAC predoctoral fellow for Spring 2025. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Disorienting Aesthetics: Sound, Affect, and the Politics of Looking in Mexico,” examines how contemporary artists and activists use performance, visual art, and sonic interventions to challenge dominant representational systems that render gendered racialized violence resistant to critique. Drawing on a queer critique of phenomenology, she argues that contemporary Mexican and hemispheric artists and activists  interrogate the limits of this politics of spectatorship and challenge majoritarian sense-making through what she calls "disorienting aesthetics" to create alternative modes of sensing, perceiving, and inhabiting spaces beyond the constraints of a feminicidal world. By centering feminist artists and activists who employ disorienting aesthetic and sonic strategies, this dissertation contributes to conversations in performance studies, feminist geography, and affect theory, demonstrating how aesthetic expressions reconfigure the spatial and sensorial politics of dissent in the face of ongoing racial and gendered dispossession.

In addition to a IAC predoctoral fellowship, Bautista is the recipient of a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship and the Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Award.