alex mireles

about

Alex Mireles is a doctoral student in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work explores questions of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, beauty, and digital visual cultures. Her master’s thesis “Paisa Aesthetics: Streetwear Fashion and Latinx Aesthetic Labor”  conceptualizes paisa as analytic to theorize the un/organized creative labor of Latinx and Chicanx fashion designers, identity formation, and belonging. “Paisa Aesthetics” received the 2022 Charlotte Stough Memorial Prize for innovative scholarship in Feminist Studies and was the UCSB entrant to the Western Association of Graduate Schools/Proquest Distinguished Master’s Thesis Competition 2022. She has been awarded and will participate in the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Alex is currently meditating on the materiality of queer Chicanx content creation through an analysis of paisa aesthetic practices online, how they queer the heteronormativity and market logics of the algorithm, and thumbing as brown queer embodied labor. She is co-founder of the  Queer Arts Collective at UCSB which seeks to carve out a space on campus for queer and theory-informed art practice through performance art, visual art, zine making, and creative writing. 

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Research interests: Fashion, Beauty,  and Digital Culture; Latinx Aesthetics and Cultural Production; Self-adornment and  Labor; Women of Color Feminisms and Queer of Color Theory; Race and Nationality; Genders and Sexualities