Jay Sosa

Affiliation: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies

Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, on leave for the 2025–2026 academic year

Jay Sosa is a political anthropologist and queer studies scholar working in Brazil and the United States and focusing on sexual governmentality, affect and aesthetics, and science and technology studies. He teaches classes on queer theory, global culture wars, pharmaceutic politics, citizenship and activism, and HIV/AIDS.

His first book, Brazil’s Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo (Texas 2024) is an ethnographic account of LGBT human rights advocacy and social movement activism in the context of increasing partisan debates over sexuality. Interpreting conflicts between advocates and opponents over LGBT+ rights as not just an ideological struggle but an aesthetic one, Brazil’s Sex Wars rethinks a style of politics that seems both utterly familiar and counterintuitive. Jay has also written about street protest, political sexism, and the production of hate crime statistics in Brazil.

Jay’s second book project, The Idea of Poppers, combines interviews and archival research to tell the story of alkyl nitrite inhalants (poppers) in the U.S. from the 19^th to 21^st centuries. The book is part social history of a queer commodity and part conceptual inquiry into the agency of chemicals.

Jay is former co-chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology, former visiting researcher at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and currently a member of the Knowledge of AIDS Research Collaboration Network.

Books

2024 Brazil’s Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Articles and Book Chapters

In Press. “Politics with a Mouth, Theory with an Asshole: Towards an Anthropofagic Queerness.” In Toward Dissent: Accessing Political Struggle Across the Americas. University of Toronto Press.

In Press. “Containing a Gray Market Drug: The Rise and Regulation of the U.S. Poppers Industry (1969-1991).” In Dealing with Drugs: New Histories of Risk/Benefit. Nils Kessel, Joseph M. Gabriel, and David Herzberg, eds. University of Rochester Press. pp. 361-380.

Forthcoming. “Volatile Matter: Poppers in the AIDS Crisis in San Francisco.” QED: A Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking.

Forthcoming. “Why AIDS Objects, Why Now?” (co-written with Paul Michael Atenzia, Marlon Bailey, Theodore Kerr, and Mairead Sullivan). Introduction to Special Issue “AIDS Objects.” QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking.

2026 “Decoding Poppers Ads: Queer Consumerism and Pharmaceutic Regulations (1975-1984).” In Queer Pasts. Alexander Street Press.

2024 “What Poppers Tell Us About Pharmaceutic Governance.” The Polyphony: Conversations Across the Medical Humanities. https://thepolyphony.org/2024/05/15/poppers-pharma-govern/

2023 “Epistemic Doubt and Affective Certainty: Counting Homotransphobia in Brazil.” Theory and Society. 52(1). 95-117.

2022 “Backlash.” Feminist Anthropology. 3(2). 198-205.

2021 “ ‘Gays Have Taken the Paulista!’: Queer Protest and Placemaking in São Paulo.” Journal of Global South Studies. 38(1). 168-193.

2021 “Experimental Urbanity in São Paulo.” (Co-written with Aiala Levy and Daniel Gough). Journal of Global South Studies. 38(1). 1-24.

2020 “Choreographing Exclusions: Race, Place and Protest in São Paulo.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 15(3). 225-235.

2019 “Subversive, Mother, Kill Joy: The Brazilian Right’s Case Against Dilma Rousseff.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society. 44(3). 717-741.

2014 “‘Marijuana is a Crime, But Homophobia is Just Fine:’ The Scandalous Logics of Queer Solidarity.” In Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms. London: Peter Lang. 215-236.

Other Writing

2020 Review of Leticia Alvarado (2018). Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production. Visual Studies. 10.1080/1472586X.2020.1741938

2019 Review of Erica Robb Larkins. 2015. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. University of California Press. Urbanities: Journal of Urban Ethnography. 9(1). 112-114.

2019 "Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976." Entry for Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts. Joachim Hochman, ed. New York: Del Monico-Prestel. 174-175.

2018 "Rites of Participation: Popular Encounters and Democratic Ritual in Brazil." Review of Victor Albert's The Limits to Citizen Power. In Anthropology Book Forum. Available online.

2017 “Whose Secularity?” Anthropology News website, November 22, 2017.

2016 Review of Vinodh Venkatesh's The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. In Masculinities Journal. 6.

2014 "A Tale of Two Rios: Urbanization and Displacement in Brazil." Latin America/Chicago: Newsletter for the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. pp. 3-4.

2014 "Sex Politics Between Anticolonialism and Human Security." Review of Paul Amar's The Security Archipelago and Scott Morgensen's Spaces Betw

Education

PhD, University of Chicago
MA, University of Chicago
BA, University of Michigan

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Jay Sosa

Selected Publications

Education