Carina Emilia Guzmán

Carina Emilia Guzmán (she/they) was born in Mexico City, raised between Mexico and Texas and lived most of her adult life as a lesbian organizer in Mexico City. This experience, along with having studied an Undergraduate degree in History and a Master’s in Geography from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, has determined her scholarly perspective and research methods. She is the initiator of The Community of Machistán Digital Collection of Art, Media and Memory and is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the Faculty of Information and The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies of the University of Toronto. In her dissertation, titled “Stor(y)ing Mi Desmadre: Trans-Feminist and Queer Community Archival Digital Custodial Praxes in Latin America,” Carina develops a speculative-pragmatic framework to study how lesbian and trans communities use histories of performance art, improvised territories and the concept of memoria (counter-hegemonic historiographic text that emerges from resistance movements) to activate archival and story-telling digital initiatives. She positions the work of these community archivists as critical interventions in hegemonic modern/colonial thought systems and homonationalist discourse by building a praxis based on the assumption that their queer, feminized, precarious, and precariously conserved materials have evidentiary status, historiographic value, and are worthy of conservation efforts and exhibitions.

[/accordion]