Sandibel Borges 
Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Videos:
Audio/Podcasts:
Biography
Dr. Sandibel Borges is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, California. Her work is situated within the fields of feminisms of color, transnational feminism, gendered and queer migrations, queer of color critique, disability justice, and critical ethnic studies. Her current book project uses ethnography, oral histories, and archival research to examine the colonial and genocidal logics of the U.S. immigration system. It further studies the ways in which queer, trans, and gender nonbinary migrants, looking at the Latinx migrant population specifically, resist and refuse such logics. Dr. Borges’s work has appeared in the journals Diálogo, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and Feminist Formations, and in the anthology Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power.
Education (4)
University of California - Santa Barbara: Ph.D., Feminist Studies 2017
University of California - Santa Barbara: M.A., Feminist Studies 2011
Washington State University: B.A., Women's Studies, Spanish Literature 2009
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: Visiting Scholar, Estudios de Género 2015
Areas of Expertise (5)
Queer and trans migrations
Decolonial Studies
Feminisms of Color
Home and Belonging
Queer, Trans, Nonbinary Latine communities
Industry Expertise (1)
Education/Learning
Articles (3)
Not Coming Out, but Building Home: An Oral History in Re-conceptualizing a Queer Migrant Home
Diálogo2015 A feminist study and oral history based in the “coming out” experiences of a Third World, Zapotec-Oaxacan, working-class immigrant woman. Discussion of community issues around queer sexualities, dominant narratives, and home building; brings attention to little-cited scholarship and theory on practices within minority communities.
Home and Homing as Resistance: Survival of LGBTQ Latinx Migrants
Women's Studies Quarterly2018 Using oral histories, this article reappropriates the concept of home to conceptualize it as a space of survival in the lives of LGBTQ Latinx migrants in Los Angeles, California, and migrant returnees in Mexico City, Mexico.
“We have to do a lot of healing”: LGBTQ migrant Latinas resisting and healing from systemic violence
Journal of Lesbian Studies2019 Using narratives from oral histories of LGBTQ migrant Latinas in Los Angeles, California, and Mexico City, Mexico, this article argues that, despite experiences of oppression, the narrators practice resistance in their daily lives. The article first addresses how the narrators confront conditions of detainability and deportability, making survival a constant struggle. It then presents different ways in which the narrators engage in resistance, from survival to community building and activism. Finally, it argues that healing is a key factor in the narrators’ resistance—healing functions as both a tool for and outcome of resistance.
