Julian Gutierrez-Albilla
Research & Practice Areas
Iberian and Latin American Cinema, Literature, Performance, and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Memory, and Embodied Hispanism.
Biography
Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. His interdisciplinary scholarship intervenes in the intersections of Iberian literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on performance and cinema as sites of embodied memory. His publications include the books Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (2017) and Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema (2008). In addition to numerous articles and chapters, he has co-edited volumes such as A Companion to Buñuel (2013) with Rob Stone, and Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference (2013) with Parvati Nair. He is the editor of a special issue on critical theory and psychoanalysis in Spanish cinema for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2018) and co-editor of a special issue dedicated to the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger for the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society with Sheila Cavanagh (2022). He also translated into Spanish Bracha L. Ettinger’s Proto-ética matricial: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte y el psicoanálisis (2019).
Professor Gutiérrez-Albilla is currently completing a manuscript that theorizes the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the re-presentation of fragility in Iberian cultural practices. This work argues that the history of modern Spain and Portugal—from the historical trauma of the Civil War to the neoliberal present—is held within the embodied memory of the fragile body. Moving beyond the view of the body as a passive object of history, he contends that the body is a living archive and a corporeal text that re-presents the past through gesture, stillness, and movement. Across three sections, the study explores specific embodied states, including exhaustion, displacement, relationality, self-shattering, failing flesh, or transition.
Through these diverse encounters, Gutiérrez-Albilla demonstrates that self-fragilization is a radical political act—a refusal of the sovereign ego demanded by authoritarian and neoliberal regimes alike. By synthesizing Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial psychoanalysis with Judith Butler’s social ontology, he theorizes the Iberian subject’s resistance to sovereignty as an ethical fragilization of the self. This pioneering methodology, which he terms Embodied Hispanism, frames the moving body as the primary instrument for wit(h)nessing the traces of trauma and precarity. Ultimately, this study offers Embodied Hispanism as a new critical orientation that reconfigures the study of Iberian cultural production: one where thinking-with Iberian cultural practices leads to a non-sovereign, com-passionate response-ability toward the irreducible other, offering a new critical orientation for transdisciplinary Iberian studies. Professor Gutiérrez-Albilla’s current research project continues his academic commitment to Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial psychoanalysis to explore how queer Iberian and Latin American literary and artistic practices facilitate a trans-subjective encounter with the traces of trauma, moving us beyond the finite limits of the individual ego toward a shared processing of the loss and mortality exposed by the AIDS epidemic.
Education
- Ph.D. Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, 2005
- M.A. Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University California Berkeley, 2001
- B.A. History of Art, University College London, 1997
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. His interdisciplinary scholarship intervenes in the intersections of Iberian literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on performance and cinema as sites of embodied memory. His publications include the books Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (2017) and Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema (2008). In addition to numerous articles and chapters, he has co-edited volumes such as A Companion to Buñuel (2013) with Rob Stone, and Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference (2013) with Parvati Nair. He is the editor of a special issue on critical theory and psychoanalysis in Spanish cinema for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2018) and co-editor of a special issue dedicated to the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger for the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society with Sheila Cavanagh (2022). He also translated into Spanish Bracha L. Ettinger’s Proto-ética matricial: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte y el psicoanálisis (2019).
Professor Gutiérrez-Albilla is currently completing a manuscript that theorizes the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the re-presentation of fragility in Iberian cultural practices. This work argues that the history of modern Spain and Portugal—from the historical trauma of the Civil War to the neoliberal present—is held within the embodied memory of the fragile body. Moving beyond the view of the body as a passive object of history, he contends that the body is a living archive and a corporeal text that re-presents the past through gesture, stillness, and movement. Across three sections, the study explores specific embodied states, including exhaustion, displacement, relationality, self-shattering, failing flesh, or transition.
Through these diverse encounters, Gutiérrez-Albilla demonstrates that self-fragilization is a radical political act—a refusal of the sovereign ego demanded by authoritarian and neoliberal regimes alike. By synthesizing Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial psychoanalysis with Judith Butler’s social ontology, he theorizes the Iberian subject’s resistance to sovereignty as an ethical fragilization of the self. This pioneering methodology, which he terms Embodied Hispanism, frames the moving body as the primary instrument for wit(h)nessing the traces of trauma and precarity. Ultimately, this study offers Embodied Hispanism as a new critical orientation that reconfigures the study of Iberian cultural production: one where thinking-with Iberian cultural practices leads to a non-sovereign, com-passionate response-ability toward the irreducible other, offering a new critical orientation for transdisciplinary Iberian studies. Professor Gutiérrez-Albilla’s current research project continues his academic commitment to Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial psychoanalysis to explore how queer Iberian and Latin American literary and artistic practices facilitate a trans-subjective encounter with the traces of trauma, moving us beyond the finite limits of the individual ego toward a shared processing of the loss and mortality exposed by the AIDS epidemic.
Research Keywords
Iberian and Latin American Cinema, Literature, Performance, and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Memory, and Embodied Hispanism.
Research Specialties
Iberian and Latin American Cinema, Literature, Performance, and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Memory, and Embodied Hispanism.
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Book
- Ettinger, B. (2019). Proto-etica matricial. Ensayos filosoficos sobre el arte y el psicoanalisis, traducido y editado por Julian Gutierrez-Albilla.
- Gutierrez-Albilla, J. (2017). Aesthetics, Ethics, and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodovar.
- Parvati Nair and Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla (Ed.). (2013). Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference.
- Gutierrez-Albilla, Julian Daniel and Stone, Rob (Ed.). (2013). Blackwell Companion to Bunuel.
- Gutierrez-Albilla, J. (2008). Queering Bunuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema.
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Office Hours
- Mondays and Wednesdays : 9 am to 10 am and by appointment