BIOGRAPHY

Alejandrina Melinda Medina (she/ella) is an experimental writer whose work theorizes state power, aesthetic production, and sensorial knowledge through 20th and 21st Century Latinx/Latin American music, sound, and performance. Her approach responds to transcuir, feminist, and anarchist political urgencies with particular attention to the Global South. Medina’s writing thinks through psychoanalysis, language, materialisms, and flesh to consider the ontologies of excess: raced, sexed, and otherwise. She is working towards a dissertation on LOUDNESS as a means to bypass the human subject of representational politics in hopes of germinating new modes of feeling Latina. This is a love letter to depressed trans Latinas who feel like they’re too much, and offers a grammar of excess on the peripheries of form.

Alejandrina’s other work ponders the (im)possibilities of intersecting trans studies and sound studies through the sensorial politics of (h)earing. This was the subject of her MA thesis titled “Transauralities, or, a Doll’s Guide to Thinking Through Sound,” which was presented alongside her performance work QUIETING DOWN (2023) in collaboration with Junyi Min and mika castañeda. She wrote the essay “Listening for Trans* Latinx Lives” as part of the discourse panel for Radical Sounds Latin America, a Berlin-based sound art festival. Her essay, “The Trans Ear/(h)earing” has been published in the Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art special series in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture. Additionally, she presented and organized a panel on thinking trans in music and sound studies at the 2023 AMS/SMT annual meeting, and has or will present similar research at Differentiating Sound Studies (Hanyang University), the 2022 AMS/SEM/SMT triple-joint meeting (New Orleans), International Association for the Study of Popular Music (Minneapolis), Feminist Theory and Music (U. Michigan), and a guest lecture at Pomona College.

A first-generation college graduate, she earned her BM from the Lawrence University, Conservatory of Music, winning the Clyde Duncan Prize in Music Aesthetics, Culture, and Literature. Medina is a soon-to-be PhD Candidate at UC San Diego in the Integrative Studies Program (Music) and graduate specialization in Critical Gender Studies. She earned a certificate in Student-Centered Learning & Syllabus Design from the Teaching & Learning Commons and will teach her own class on Latinx Feminist Aesthetics in summer 2024. So far at UCSD, she has been awarded the Carolyn Applebaum Endowed Prize, a Tyler Center for Global Studies Fellowship, a Department of Music DEI Research Grant, and a Conrad Prebys Community Engagement Grant and earned her MA. Alejandrina sits on the executive board of Proyecto Trans Latina, the graduate student committee of Project Spectrum, and is the advisor for Mariachi La Joya del Sur. You can usually find Alejandrina yearning queerly, singing boleros, or with her cat María Carmen.