Dr Leticia Sabsay

Leticia Sabsay is Associate Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture and Director of the Doctoral Programme.

Please note that Leticia is on sabbatical leave during Winter Term 2027.

Leticia Sabsay is an interdisciplinary social theorist and gender scholar whose research examines the transnational politics of democracy, populism, and authoritarianism, with particular attention to gender, embodiment, and the psychosocial dimensions of political life. Her work interrogates contemporary struggles over sexual freedom and justice in popular culture, artistic practices, and political discourse. Working across feminist and queer theory, critical and political theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural and media studies, she is especially interested in tracing how these imaginaries are shaped and contested through affective and bodily politics, and how these struggles travel across disciplines and transnational contexts.

Dr Sabsay has published extensively in English and Spanish on sexual citizenship and diversity, the politics of recognition, sex work, performativity and bodily politics, vulnerability, and the aesthetics of populism and authoritarianism, including essays in Citizenship Studies, Cultural Studies, and Theory & Event, as well as in popular journals such as Open Democracy. She is the author of The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom (Palgrave 2016) and, with Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti, co-editor of Vulnerability in Resistance (Duke 2016). In Spanish, she has authored two books, the last of which, Fronteras Sexuales: Espacio Urbano, Cuerpos y Ciudadanía (Paidos 2011), has been widely recognised as a key contribution to gender studies in Latin America.

Before joining LSE in 2014, she held teaching and research positions in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and in the Department of Politics and International Studies at The Open University. Prior to settling in the UK, she taught at the University of Buenos Aires for more than ten years and conducted postdoctoral research at Freie Universität Berlin.

Dr Sabsay is a board member of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs.

She is co-editor of two book series: Thinking Gender in Transnational Times, with Sadie Wearing and Ania Plomien for Palgrave Macmillan, and Critical South, with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Natalia Brizuela for Polity Press.

Expertise

Feminist and queer theory; media and visual studies; performativity and theories of discourse; Latin American and transnational sexual politics; embodiment and vulnerability; psychosocial approaches to politics; political aesthetics; theories of radical democracy and populism.

Dr Sabsay’s research traces how gender and sexuality shape political imaginaries, social movements and struggles over democracy. Her first two books examine sexual democratisation in post-dictatorship Argentina. Las Normas del Deseo (2009) draws on theories of gender performativity and subject formation to show how the media and the law helped to reshape imaginaries of citizenship and the public sphere. Fronteras Sexuales (2011) extends this analysis to urban space and the regulation of bodies, examining the boundaries of sexual citizenship and the exclusions affecting sex work, trans and queer communities and cultures. Together, the books show how liberal and neoliberal ideas of subjecthood shaped the promise of sexual inclusion, and how new hierarchies emerged during the democratic turn.

Her book The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom (2016) extends this inquiry into transnational sexual rights discourse. It asks how apparently inclusive accounts of freedom and citizenship can reproduce racialised and colonial hierarchies, and it develops a relational and performative account of sexual and political agency. Drawing on cultural texts, public discourse and theoretical debates, the book challenges individualistic understandings of sexual identity and proposes a psychosocial conception of embodiment that implies a different conception of radical democratic sexual politics for our time.

Her current research brings gender scholarship into debates on the crisis of democracy, populism and authoritarianism. It continues to examine bodily politics while extending this work to political aesthetics, moving from feminist movements in Latin America to counter-hegemonic cultural and artistic practices, and to the affective forces that sustain political identification amid the rise of right-wing political actors. Her concept of the “political aesthetics of cruelty” provides a psychosocial framework for analysing how cruelty becomes normalised in contemporary authoritarian politics. She is currently working on a monograph developing this framework to investigate the appeal of the new right and how destructive impulses are mobilised amid imperialist logics, social inequality and violence, while showing how central anti-gender movements and misogyny are to the operation of power today.