Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez

Dr. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez is a trans of color scholar-clinician who researches and writes in the interstices between psychoanalysis, trans studies, and structural social work. Her scholarship centers embodiment, sexuality, performance, and psychic life across the contemporary Americas. She is the author of Bottoms Up: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance (NYU Press, 2024), which examines queer Mexican and Latinx performance as an embodied encounter with pleasure, pain, sex, and death.

Her current project, Trans and the Psychopath, examines transgender psychic life under conditions that pathologize trans existence. Through a close reading of coercive control, this work traces how social violence becomes part of a subject’s inner world and lived through the body, relationships, and institutional life: where care, diagnosis, and documentation can reproduce the conditions of domination.

At Crown, Dr. Cervantes-Gómez teaches structural social work, sexuality, research methods, and Mexican Chicago. Her courses bring psychoanalysis, social theory, and critical race, queer, and trans studies into conversation with contemporary social work practice. Her teaching approaches theory as a language through which students can name and analyze structures already shaping their own lives and communities.

Dr. Cervantes-Gómez also works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Chicago. She earned her MA in Social Work, Social Policy, and Social Administration from the University of Chicago. She also holds a PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture from the University of Southern California, an MTS in Religions of the Americas and Theology from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA from the University of California, Riverside.