Alexandra Mira Alonso (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at Georgetown University. She is originally from Barcelona, and she joined Georgetown University in 2020.
Her work, explored in published articles and presentations, focuses on appropriations and reformulations of working-class culture in neoliberal 20th and 21st-century Iberian societies. She examines the many political layers around the commodification and fetishization of oppressed collective memories —manifested in multiple cultural artifacts, including queer and trans artivism (such as drag performances), Catalan trap, television memes, and archives.
Her dissertation, Trashy Aesthetics: 21st-century Cultures of the Working Class, proposes two cultural disidentification processes with which to read trash culture. By bridging non-canonical productions and archives, the project illuminates how the elitist conceptions of "intellectualism" in the public sphere have shaped Iberia's proletarian memories and aesthetic imaginaries (including cultural hybridization between Spanish, Catalan, and Caribbean cultures). Her dissertation also aims to show how neoliberalism commodified said narratives and aesthetics to profit off systemically marginalized voices.
Her second research project, a cultural cartography of Barcelona's queer cabaret celebrities under Francoism, is a recipient of the 2024 Georgetown's Gender +Justice Initiative Fellowship.