Kimberly Soriano

Kimberly Soriano (she/they) is a queer Oaxacan and Guerrerense educator and community member raised in Central Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024 and a dual B.A. in Chicana/o studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her teaching focuses on the intersections between surveillance, tech, and carcerality in Latinx communities; harm reduction, struggles for bodily autonomy and sexual labor; queer and trans Latinidades; and urban studies.

Soriano’s current book project is titled Feminist Fugitivities in Latinx Los Angeles, where she uses archival and ethnographic research to understand how racialized and migrant women, queer and trans communities navigate community stigma, policing, and surveillance in carceral geographies of Los Angeles. She unmaps strategies of spatial policing such as gang injunctions, encampment sweeps, and anti-prostitution injunctions by Los Angeles and the care practices that are cultivated by criminalized communities.

Her work has been funded by the American Association of University Women and the Southern California Library for Social Science and Research. Future work focuses on an erotic and racialized life of surveillance, such as the surveillance of sex workers and abortion seekers. She has taught courses on Sexuality, Race and the State as a postdoctoral fellow in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Washington University in St Louis. Her work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly and Sexuality Research and Social Policy Journal. Soriano’s public-facing writing can be found at Los Angeles Public Press and Metropole.

Soriano’s community work spans across popular education, mutual aid, and harm reduction with Southern California Library, Our Data Bodies, The Sidewalk Project, and SWOPLA. Kim enjoys making films, taking polaroids, chihuahuas, collecting Latinx print culture and ephemera such as zines, prints, and protest pins; she also loves learning a new skill or craft.