UF Center for Latin American Studies
Twentieth-century Latin American history, social movements, gender and sexuality, domestic labor, sex work, the politics of reproduction and reproductive rights, second and third-wave feminisms
Brazil
Meg Weeks is a historian, writer, and translator, and joins the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies as an assistant professor in the spring of 2024. Originally from New Hampshire, she earned a BA in history from Brown University in 2011. She went on to earn an MA and PhD in history from Harvard University, with a secondary field in women, gender, and sexuality studies. She researches twentieth-century Latin America, focusing on gender, labor, reproductive rights, and sexuality in Brazil. Her academic work has been published in Journal of the History of Sexuality and Philia.
Her first book project, From the House to the Street: Sex Workers and Domestic Laborers in Brazil’s Democratic Transition, intervenes in debates about grassroots feminism and Brazilian re- democratization in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, contending that poor women of color, mobilizing around their rights as workers and citizens, actively participated in the political opening that ushered in a new democratic age after the country’s Cold War-era military dictatorship (1964–85). This project, which draws on extensive archival research in addition to oral histories and analysis of cultural production, examines social movements formed by Brazilian sex workers and domestic laborers in the late twentieth century, following their trajectories from their origins on the Catholic Left through their consolidation as organized civil society entities wielding incisive critiques not only of Brazilian authoritarianism but also of their country’s entrenched racism, classism, and misogyny.
In addition to her academic work, Weeks writes on topics ranging from feminism to contemporary art and literature to labor organizing for a variety of non-academic journals, including n+1, New York Review of Books, Artforum, piauí, and frieze. She is also a translator of contemporary Brazilian fiction and non-fiction, with translations published in journals such as Adi, Asymptote, and Two Lines. Her annotated translation of the memoir of Brazilian sex-worker activist Gabriela Leite, complete with an introduction co-authored with Laura Murray and Esther Teixeira, will be published by Duke University Press in late 2024.
Weeks is currently supervising a multiyear project to organize, catalog, and digitize the archival holdings of Brazil’s National Federation of Domestic Workers, funded by two grants from the Modern Endangered Archives Program of the UCLA library system.
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