Patricia Gomes' research seeks to explore what race, gender, and other intersecting forms of identity mean within Latin America. Specifically, her investment lies in understanding how the Afro-Latino, Afro-Brazilian body comes to signify within a white, heteronormative, patriarchal society in relation to practices of miscegenation and racial whitening. What does it mean to successfully perform racial passing or how does the body becomes vulnerable or outed by failing to perform? What implications and relationships between and within a socio-economic, political, biopolitical, diasporic collective memory, and trauma at play here for the racialized body? How do Afro-Latino bodies queer these categories of identity in order to conform or subvert dominant and oppressive ideologies in countries that appear to be in a moment of overall identity crisis. Patricia uses feminist and Afro-Brazilian artist and performance work to ground her analysis of how the body in performance or performative acts of identity come to signify and how these performances are interacting with larger institutional structures.