Event Date
⭐️ Presented by the Office of Academic Diversity, part of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero
Assistant Professor, Digital Cinema and Media
Special Time: 2:30-4:00pm
Beneath the Legacy Mirrorball: Social Mediated Latinas Compete Across YouTube and Reality Television
Venezuelan YouTuber Lele Pons’ career trajectory from sketch comedy YouTuber in the 2010s to recording artist (2018-present) and cast member on Dancing with the Stars in 2023 reflects larger trends in how contemporary Latinx performers negotiate stardom and visibility. Online and on network television, Pons’ image is mediated through varied, yet consistent, visual-verbal references to her ethnoracial self-identification. This talk combines approaches from film, television, star, and internet studies into a digital Latinx studies framework, through which I read Pons’ displays of ethnoracial identity as a self-mediation strategy specific to an internet content creator type I term “Social Mediated Latinas.”