Alexandra Mira Alonso (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on appropriations and reformulations of the working class, deemed “trash culture” in neoliberal 20th and 21st-century Iberian societies. She examines the many political layers around the commodification of oppressed collective memories —such as queer and trans artivism.
Research Project: “Archiving Proto-Queer Celebrity Culture in Barcelona”
To challenge the notion of the neoliberal “young, white, thin, blonde celebrity,” this project examines how parallel, non-normative worlds were constructed in 20th-century Barcelona as a means for marginalized people to de-power cultural capital. This research project analyzes a set of photographs retrieved from the debris left by the closure of the abandoned photo studio FotoRamblas in Barcelona. The photographed subjects became stars and counter-cultural icons (particularly queer artists and vedettes, such as Merche Mar or Carmen de Mairena) within the realms of the city’s underworlds, ruled by Francoism’s violent ‘antisocial’ laws. The project aims to develop an open-access cartography (GIS system) of how these celebrity images circulated between 1950 and 1990 and how their transgression of gendered norms laid the foundations of political resistance in the city.