Professor
Chavez is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of
Wisconsin. Dr. Chavez’s scholarship is primarily informed by queer of
color theory and women of color feminism. She is a rhetorical critic who
variously utilizes textual and field based methods to study social movement
building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. Her work emphasizes the
rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures,
and also attends to rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about
marginalized folks and the systems that oppress them (e.g., immigration system,
prisons etc.). In 2013, she published her first book, Queer Migration
Politics, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of
queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. She is
working on a new manuscript, AIDS Knows No Borders, which explores
AIDS activism and organizing on the issue of immigration and within immigrant
communities during what is often described as the height of the AIDS pandemic
in North America (1981-1995). Dr. Chavez earned her PhD at Arizona State
University in 2007.
