Samanta Ordóñez

Dr. Samanta Ordóñez investigates the construction of racialized gender categories and how they are being resisted and challenged by politically transformative cultural practices in diverse contemporary social settings. Her current teaching and research deal with Mexican and diasporic contexts where gender- and race-based hierarchies re-articulate the global logic of coloniality in neoliberal, populist, and other guises. She studies where translocal communities engage in complex forms of intercultural relationality to generate and share in alterable social identities, unrecognized forms of political and social activism, adaptive coalitions, and ways of living in resistance.

Her courses introduce intersectional and decolonial perspectives on cultural configurations of race and gender. This enhances students’ ability to recognize patterns of domination and practices of opposition unfolding within the structural dimensions of neoliberal globalization as lived and experienced from the heterogeneous positionalities constituting Mexican, Latin American, Latinx, Black, Asian, indigenous, and other overlapping social collectivities. She is the author of Mexico Unmanned: The Cultural Politics of Masculinity in Mexican Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). This book is a study of current filmmaking that critically illustrates how Mexico’s deeply embedded mythologies of mestizo masculinity continue to manifest in categorically dehumanizing cultural representations of racialized men. Her scholarship appears in Chasqui and Studies in Hispanic and Latin American Cinemas. Dr. Ordóñez holds degrees from the Universidad Veracruzana (B.A.), the University of Western Ontario (M.A.), and Cornell University (M.A. & Ph.D.).

• SPA 212: Exploring the Hispanic World
• SPA 280:  Puertas y perspectivas
• SPA 313: Lights, Camera, Accion!
• SPA 317:Distant Neighbors: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Mexico and Central America
• SPA 369:  Special Topics: Masculinity in Mexican Cinema

Ordóñez CV