A conversation with professor Emma Perez, a research social scientist in the Southwest Center and professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona.

Perez's first novel, "Gulf Dreams," was published in 1996 and is considered one of th first Chicana lesbian novels in print. Her second novel, "Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory" (2009) won the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant (2009) as well as the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction (2011). She continues to research and write about LGBT Chicanx/Mexicanx in the borderlands through her two latest projects, "The Will to Feel: Decolonial Methods, Queer and Otherwise," which promises to be a brief study that interrogates the coloniality of feelings. The second project is a dystopic novel, "I, Ben Espinoza," which probes a colonial global order run by the wealthy one percent.