In this comprehensive account of transvestism and the performance of gender in Latin American Literature, Ben. Sifuentes-Jauregui explores the figure of the transvestite and his/her relation to the body through a series of canonical Latin American texts. By analyzing works by Alejo Carpentier, Jose Donoso, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig alongside critical works in gender studies and queer-theory, Sifuentes-Jaurgeui shows how transvestism operates not only to destabilize, but often to affirm sexual, gender, national, and political identities.

Academic Service

University Committees

• 2004 - 2005, Chair, Search Committee for Chair of Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies.
• 2004 - 2005, Committee Member, Task Force on Undergraduate Life and Learning. [Sub-committee member, Curriculum/Core].
• 2004 - 2006, Committee Member, Honorary Ph.D. Committee.
• Spring 2004, Committee Member, FAS Committee to Increase Faculty Diversity.
• Fall 2003, Committee Member, FAS Task Force on Race and Ethnicity.
• 2001 - 2004, Committee Member, Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes (Member, Programs Sub-Committee, 2002 - 2003).
• 1998 - 2001, Faculty Council Representative, New Brunswick Faculty Council (Member, Undergraduate Admissions and Recruitment Sub-committee, 2000 - 2001).

Comparative Literature Departmental Committees

• 2004 - 2005, 2002 - 2003 Member, Executive Committee, Comparative Literature.
• 2001 - 2002, Committee Member, Comparative Literature Undergraduate Curriculum Review Committee.

Spanish & Portuguese Departmental Committees

• 2002 - 2003, Committee Member, Graduate Course of Study Advisory Committee.
• 2001 - 2002, Committee Member, Departmental Bylaws Review Ad hoc Committee.
• 2001 - 2003, Department Co-Bibliographer.
• 2001 - 2002, Committee Member, Honors Committee.
• 2000 - 2001, Committee Member, Examination Committee.
• 2000 - 2001, Committee Member, Doctoral Examination Review Ad hoc Committee.
• 1999 - 2000, Committee Member, Undergraduate Course of Study Committee.
• 1998 - 2000, Graduate Admissions Committee, Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
• 1998 - 1999, Committee Member, Conference and Activities Committee.
• 1998 - 2003, Academic Advisor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
• 1998 - 1999, Co-Chair, Distinguished Lecturer Series: “Spectacles of the Macho in Art/Literature/ Politics/Film.”
• 1997 - 1998, Committee Member, Undergraduate Course of Study Committee.
• 1997 - 1998, Committee Member, Distinguished Lecturer Series: “Changing Empires: 1898-1998.”

College Committees

• 2000-2003, Committee Member, Rutgers College, Student Services Advisory Committee (formerly, Faculty Advisory Committee for First-year Residential Life).
• 2000 - 2002, Committee Member, Douglass College, Student Academic Advisory Committee.
• 1997-present, Fellow, Rutgers College (Faculty Senator, 2003-2005).
• 1997-present, Fellow, Douglass College (Faculty Senator, 1998-1999).

Service to the Profession

Prof. Sifuentes-Jáuregui is member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY. He has served as a referee for academic journals in the field of Latin American literature and literary theory, and has been a manuscript reader and consultant to several university and academic presses in the United States and Great Britain.

• Ph.D., Department of Spanish, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. November 1993
• M. Phil., Spanish American Literature, Yale University. Minor in Comparative Literature. December 1990
• M.A., Spanish Language and Literature, Yale University. December 1989
• B.A., Comparative Literature, Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut. May 1987

• August 2002, Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York.
• 2001 - 2002, Faculty Fellow, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey.
• Spring 2001, Academic Sabbatical.
• 1998 - 1999, Principal Investigator, Ford Foundation Grant: “Writers at the Border” Project, RULAS.
• 1998 - 1999, Faculty Fellow, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers.
• 1992 - 1993, Yale University Dissertation Fellowship.
• 1987 - 1992, Yale University Fellowship.
• 1988, Richter Summer Travel Fellowship.
• 1987, The Margaret Laughlin Marshall and John M. S. Allison Prize Fellowship in European History of Art and Letters. (History of Art, Yale).
• 1987, The Albert Bildner Prize for a Graduating Senior in Spanish, Yale College

• "Adonis's Silence: Textual Queerness in Luis Zapata's El vampiro de la Colonia Roma" in Cultura Moderna, I, 1 (Spring 2005)
• “Loss, Identification, and Heterosexual Tendencies in Poniatowska's Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela” in Latin American Literary Review, XXIX, 57 (Jan.-June 2001): 71-86.
• “Sadomasochism in Paradiso: Histories of Sexuality and Ecstasy” in Foucault in Latin America. Benigno Trigo, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 263-276.
• “Travestismo textual: Modos y modas de Carpentier” in Breve historia feminista de la literatura. Ileana Rodríguez Andara, ed. (Madrid: Anthropos Editorial, 2001), 235-256.
• “El género sin límites. Travestismo y subjetividad en El lugar sin límites”in Sexo y sexualidad en América Latina. Daniel Balderston y Donna Guy, compiladores. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1998), 83-106.
• “The Swishing of Gender: Homographetic Marks in Lazarillo de Tormes” in Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Sylvia Molloy, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 123-140.
• "National Fantasies: Peeking into the Latin American Closet” in Transforming the Categories: A CLAGS Reader. Martin B. Duberman, ed. (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 290-301.

Teaching and Research Interests

• US Latino/a Writing and Border Theory
• Chicano/a Literature and Post-Colonial Theory
• Latin American Cultural Studies
• Gender in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature
• Latin American Film and Writing
• Melodrama
• Race and Psychoanalysis

Current Research and Forthcoming Publications

“Melodramatic Latin America: Gender, Masochism and Unbound Narratives.”

This book project will examine the currency of melodramatic narratives and discourses in a series of Latin American works—literature, film, music. It will analyze how melodrama functions as a hegemonic discourse to represent and alter notions of gender, sexual, cultural, social, and national identities. The principal goals of this project are two-fold: first, to describe how melodramatic discourse is articulated and grafted in a series of contemporary Latin American narratives; second, and more importantly, to understand how the melodramatic self-figurations around gender identities that emerge in these texts engage or resist theoretical categorizations being produced in the United States about sexuality and gender studies, as well as gay/lesbian and queer studies. In this project, I privilege and rethink melodrama as a particular rhetorical form in Latin American literature and culture.

• Introduction. Melodramatic Attachments: Gender / Masochism / Pleasure and the Latin American Sphere
• Chapter I. Loss, Identification, and Heterosexual Tendencies in Poniatowska's Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela
• Chapter II. “Is It Painful Being Ugly?”: Masochism and Ecstasy in Lispector's The Hour of the Star
• Chapter III. Passionate Narratives: Engendering the Archive (On García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold)
• Chapter IV. Prostitution and Ethical Masochism in the Melodramatic Text
• Chapter V. Cinema and Melodrama: Boytler, Gout, and a History of Prostitution
• Chapter VI. Race and Melodrama: Angelitos negros and Other Imitations of Life
• Chapter VII. Boleros
• Conclusion. Monsiváis's Melodrama

Courses Taught

Graduate

• 16:195:501. Introduction to Literary Theory
• 16:940:598. Melodrama and/in Latin American Textualities.
• 16:940:651. Psychoanalytic Theory and Spanish American Literature.
• 16:940:651. Novelas de Fundación y Deconstrucción.
• 16:590:601. U.S. Latina/o Writing Border Culture and Strategies of Identity.
• 16:940:659. Latin American Narrative and Gender Theory.

Undergraduate

• 01:050:300. Race
• 01:050:301. Issues in Latino/a Literature and Culture.
• 01:195:395. Literature and Masculinity: From Don Juan to Queer Theory.
• 01:940:490. Puig and the Aesthetics of Rewriting
• 01:940:334. Literature and Culture of Spanish America II.
• 01:940:492. Seminar in Hispanic Literature and Culture: Melodramatic Latin America.
• 01:195:312. Comparative Literature. Literature and the Psyche.
• 02:090:356. Livingston College Honors Seminar. Gender Migrancy: Transvestism as a Critical Practice in Contemporary Culture.
• 01:940:326. Advanced Language Workshop.
• 01:940:492. Spanish American Literature and Psychoanalysis.
• 01:940:490. Seminar in Hispanic Literature and Culture: Rereadings of la Novela de la Revolución: Nation, Masculinity and Performativity.
• 01:940:491. Latin American Narrative and Gender Theory.
• 01:940:448. Spanish American Novel II (“Boom” and Post-boom).
• 01:940:333. Literature and Culture of Spanish America I.
• 01:940:216. Introduction to Hispanic Literature (Literary Forms).
• 01:940:215. Main Currents in Hispanic Literature.

Dissertations and Undergraduate Honors Theses

Prof. Sifuentes-Jáuregui is director and member of doctoral and M.A. theses committees in Spanish American Literature, Comparative Literature, Women's and Gender Studies, and English. His students have written on a variety of topics from religiosity in Latin America and gender performativity in Caribbean narrative, from AIDS narratives in Latin America, to Latina identities and food, and African Diasporic performance. He has served on doctoral and M.A. examinations committees. Additionally, he has directed numerous undergraduate honors theses in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies, as well as worked on M.A. in Translation projects.

Teaching Experience

• Associate Professor. Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Program in Comparative Literature. Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey. Fields of specialization: Latin American Literature and Culture, Mexican Literature, US Latino/a Literature and Cultural Studies, and Literary Theory.
• Affiliated Member in Latin American Studies, Comparative Literature (Core Faculty), and Women's and Gender Studies. (July 2003 - present).
• Undergraduate Director of Comparative Literature. Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey. (July 2002 - June 2003).
• Assistant Professor. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey. (July 1997 - June 2003).
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish. Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Wesleyan University. (September 1994 - June 1997).
• Adjunct Assistant Professor. Master of Arts Program in Liberal Studies, New York University. (Spring 1995).Lecturer. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University. (Academic year 1993 - 94).
• Teaching Fellow/Part-time Acting Instructor. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University. (1988 - 93).