Surfing Desire: Romance, Identity, and Fantasy in a Transnational Context
Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lecture by Anna Hidalgo
This talk uses the surprising case of transnational intimate relationships between foreign women and local men in a Peruvian beach town, to understand how these relationships, and the context in which they occurred, became sites for individuals to resist experiences of marginality and alienation, and reimagine future possibilities for themselves. I also uncover how these relationships reflect a broader social phenomenon in which, I argue, fantasy arises as a solution when people exist in conditions where life feels constrained and meaningless. Fantasy provides the economic, symbolic, and erotic imaginaries that help people to recover meaning and persist. Based on my current book project, this work brings together literature from cultural and economic sociology, with work in gender, sexuality, and queer studies, to demonstrate how people seek to imagine something different for themselves and for their futures that allows them to transcend the reality of their everyday lives.
Anna Hidalgo is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at New York University. She is an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist studying culture, sexuality, gender, and race. Anna is currently working on a book manuscript which examines transnational intimate relationships in a Peruvian coastal town. She examines masculine subcultures, tourism and escapism, and how fantasy functions as a way for people to manage and resist the socially and structurally constrained conditions that they experience in everyday life. A new project focuses on the experiences of Venezuelan asylum seekers in New York City. Her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the American Association for University Women, among others. Anna received her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and her BA in History from Brown University. She was born in the Dominican Republic, and was raised in South Florida.
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