Philipp Seidel
Short Bio
Philipp Seidel is a research assistant at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. During his BA studies in Spanish Philology with Latin American Studies and Journalism and Communication Studies at the same university, he completed an Erasmus exchange semester at the Università di Milano. He obtained a master’s degree in Romance Literature (with focus on Spanish and Portuguese) from the Freie Universität Berlin and subsequently worked as a university assistant at Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria, from 2016–2019. Currently, he is pursuing his doctorate with a project on neo-baroque literature in Argentina, Chile and Brazil as a genuine expression of a Latin American queer aesthetics. Philipp will be a Mecila Doctoral Researcher in São Paulo form July to December 2024. He co-organized the publication Cuerpos diversos. Estéticas de diversidad corporal en España y América Latina en los siglos XX y XXI (2023). His research focuses on Caribbean literatures, the (neo)avant-gardes, the neo-baroque, the literary and cultural representation of minorities from a queer perspective and, relatedly, the relationship of (marginalised) bodies.
Project for the Network
His contribution to the network will focus on Mario Mieli’s impact on Argentinian writer and activist Néstor Perlongher, who had emigrated to Brazil where he worked at the Unversidade de Campinas while obtaining his master’s degree in Anthropology with the first project on male prostitution in Bazil: O negócio do michê: Prostitução viril em São Paulo (1987). At the same time, Perlongher became an active member of São Paulo’s gay/queer movements. His interest in the neo-baroque as alternative aesthetics for Latin American queer voices and bodies was driven by a fundamental questioning of fixed identity concepts. Perlongher focussed on the becoming –‘dévenir’– rather than on the being of self and, hence, considers the process of becoming a ‘loca’ –the Latin American poor homosexual– or a ‘travesti’ –the Brazilian transvestite– the most appropriate way to liberate the self from societal constraints of sex, gender and desire. Just like Milie in his Elementi di critica omossesuale (1977), Perlongher argues in favour of a radically free love and free desire in order to build a just society based on solidarity. Beyond this specific constellation, a more general step will be taken to analyse whether and to what extent a neo-baroque movement can also be said to exist in Italian literature.