Isabel Felix Gonzales is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia and a New City Arts Fellow. Their visual and written work explores the aesthetic and political cultures of the 21st century and how queer, trans, and nonbinary people of color engage in forms of illegibility, unruliness, kin-making, escape, and refusal. In doing so, Isabel explores an eclectic archive that ranges from the Tumblr poetics and activism of the late Mark Aguhar, anti-Proposition 8 political campaigns, “gross-out” reality television, and the performances and fan cultures of American rock band My Chemical Romance. 

They are a recipient of the 2025 APSA Advancing Research Grant for Early Career Scholars, and the 2022 recipient of the NCOBPS Bayard Rustin Award. Isabel’s work has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, The Palgrave Handbook of Fashion and Politics, Terrorism and Popular Culture, in the forthcoming The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Politics and Gender, and in non-academic essay collections, including SWARM: Answering the Call.  

Isabel received a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and is currently working on their book, ALL THE BELOVED I COULDN’T DESCRIBE: Queer Illegibility and 21st Century Crisis of Identity.