Amanda Parraguez-Mulligan
- AmandaParraguez2025@u.northwestern.edu
- Crowe 3-171, 3-175, 3-179, 1860 S Campus Drive
Amanda Parraguez-Mulligan is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, specializing in 20th/21st century French literature and film. She holds a Master of Arts in French and Francophone studies from Syracuse University, and two Licenses (BAs) from the University of Strasbourg. She was awarded a fellowship for the Paris Program in Critical Theory in 2024/2025.
Her dissertation project interrogates the processes of symbolization and desymbolization in representations of sex work in 20th and 21st century French literature and cinema. By focusing on moments of rupture with traditional representational modes and the limits of language, her research explores how works from her corpus, which include works by Colette, Marcel Proust, George Bataille, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Gordard, Chantal Ackerman, Chloé Delaume, Virginie Despentes, and Wendy Delorme, destabilize the “whore stigma” and prostitution as a metaphorical construct to resist normative sexual epistemologies.
Her research interests notably include 20th century critical theory, politics of sexuality, theories of embodiment, feminist and queer approaches, and liminality.