The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (they/elle) is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where they are a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. They are a queer Chicane artist and scholar from Sonoma, California. José received a B.A. in Religion and Latin American/Latino Studies from Swarthmore College (2023), where they co-founded Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal. Their undergraduate thesis explored notions of nationalism, “high” art, and popular entertainment in La Más Draga, a Mexican drag reality competition. 

At UC Berkeley, José’s research looks at the intersection of aesthetics, pain, and spirituality in the Americas, centering on the practices of Black and Latina/e women and queer femmes. They interrogate the racialized/sexed body through the framework of “beautiful suffering,” which asks, how do women and femme practitioners—across place/space, time, and tradition—create a sense of agency and belonging via the aesthetic production of (sacred) pain? At the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, it fleshes out questions of ethical mutilation, radical intimacy, and sacred erotics in forms as diverse as colonial mortification of the flesh, Latin American/Latinx performance art, and BDSM/kink sex practices. The project turns to affective registers of negativity—including anger, disgust, disidentification, grief, mourning, and violation—as potential sites for healing, as well as political and spiritual interventions into coalitional politics and relationality.