I am an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender, where I will be working with Dr Zoë Boden-Stuart. My research interests lie in the intersection of queer theory, psychosocial studies, sexual dissident critique and LGBTIQ+ mental health, with a special focus on depathologising practices.

My ESRC Fellowship further develops the findings of my doctoral research, which critically interrogated what has been called the ‘turn to sexual and gender diversity’ in the psy professions. It did so by exploring how the concept of diversity has been taken up by psy professionals working with LGBTIQ+ people in Chile, asking how the ambivalences and contestations around its uses are expressive of broader psychosocial processes. My doctoral thesis is also an analysis of the ghostly elements that haunt diversity work in the present and that expose the psy professions’ troubling relationship with race, cis-heteronormativity and the past of the Chilean dictatorship.

During the fellowship year, I will explore what a non-pathologising, affirmative and culturally competent approach to mental health means and does for LGBTIQ+ diversity workers within the psy professions. To answer this, I will undertake secondary analysis of existing data from my doctoral study and run two collaborative knowledge exchange workshops with mental health practitioners working with LGBTIQ+ people in three cities of Chile and Brighton, aiming to develop policy recommendations and practice from a non-pathologising and social justice framework. In doing so, I hope to intervene in understanding how a demand for producing more knowledge and evidence about LGBTIQ+ mental health is articulated, who responds to such demand, and through which means. 

In addition to the above, together with Aiko Holvikivi (LSE) and Billy Holzberg (KCL) I am co-editing a book on transnational anti-gender politics (under contract with Palgrave’s Thinking Gender in Transnational Times series). We put together a project based on an ongoing Engenderings’ blog series to explore further the transnational dimension of current attacks on gender, feminism and LGBTIQ+ rights, which travel under the expression ‘anti-gender ideology’, 'anti-genderism' or 'anti-gender identity ideology'. 

I studied gender studies at postgraduate level at LSE Department of Gender Studies, where I completed my PhD in January 2022. Prior to joining LSE, I worked as a clinical psychologist, a diversity worker and advisor in sex education in Santiago, Chile. As part of my training as a psychotherapist, I pursued a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Chile, specialising in psychoanalysis.