Chisme and its Antinomies: Rethinking Mexican Women’s Relationship to Capital

Lizeth Gutierrez is a current Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the American Studies department at Macalester College. She completed her Ph.D. in American Studies from Washington State University in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies. During her final year, she received a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows Dissertation Grant by The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Lizeth was also awarded a Mellon Mays Pre-doctoral Research Grant and a Graduate Studies Enhancement Grant from the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives program. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish with a minor in Sociology from Grinnell College, and is a Newberry Library Fellow from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. Fun fact, Lizeth is also the first Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Grinnell College to complete her Ph.D. Her research interests include Chicana feminisms, political economy, queer of color critique, and labor studies. She has an article published in Aztlán on chisme and is currently working on converting her dissertation, “Queer Chisme: Transformative Political Practices of Mexican Immigrant Women in the Global Economy,” into a book. Her current research queers chisme as a spatial practice that harvests homosocial bonds between undocumented Mexican women to examine how Mexican women negotiate the global economy.