Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lecture: “Surfing Desire”
Surfing Desire: Romance, Identity, and Fantasy in a Transnational Context
Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lecture by Anna Hidalgo
This talk examines transnational intimate relationships between foreign women and local men in a Peruvian beach town, exploring how these connections—and the social context in which they emerge—serve as sites of resistance against marginality and alienation. Anna Hidalgo argues that these relationships reflect a broader phenomenon in which fantasy becomes a means of coping with constrained and seemingly meaningless lives. Fantasy, she suggests, provides the economic, symbolic, and erotic imaginaries that help individuals recover meaning and persist. Drawing from her current book project, Hidalgo integrates perspectives from cultural and economic sociology, as well as gender, sexuality, and queer studies, to demonstrate how people imagine alternative futures that allow them to transcend their everyday realities.
Anna Hidalgo is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at New York University. She is an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist studying culture, sexuality, gender, and race. Anna is currently working on a book manuscript which examines transnational intimate relationships in a Peruvian coastal town. She examines masculine subcultures, tourism and escapism, and how fantasy functions as a way for people to manage and resist the socially and structurally constrained conditions that they experience in everyday life. A new project focuses on the experiences of Venezuelan asylum seekers in New York City. Her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the American Association for University Women, among others. Anna received her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and her BA in History from Brown University. She was born in the Dominican Republic, and was raised in South Florida.
