Undergraduate Research

Undergraduate Research

As an undergraduate student, Romeo was fascinated with understanding perceptions of queer men. In their first year at Indiana University - Bloomington, they ran a correlational study attempting to identify a relationship between people's attitudes toward gay men and lesbians and their implicit biases toward queer people, as measured by Harvard's Sexuality IAT. At the University of Michigan, they attempted to find a relationship between feelings toward queer men and their perceptions of those queer men as masculine or feminine.

Romeo began their courses in LGBTQIA+ studies in 2018 and has felt at home writing about gender, sexuality, and queerness ever since. They have written about the stigma around men's sex toy use and being penetrated, queerness and latinidad (a sense of being Latinx), and transnormativity and transfeminism. 

Using their background in psychology and their development in Spanish linguistics, Romeo began studying the use of the gender-neutral -x and other forms of trans-inclusive Spanish. This culminated in a small psycholinguistics study amongst Spanish speakers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the mental images that trans-inclusive Spanish conjures in the mind of the speaker.

Romeo's interest in content analysis and representations in media began with one of his psychology courses taught by a now dear friend, Soraya Giaccardi! In this course, Romeo developed a codebook to evaluate the representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters in modern situational comedies. For more information on this work, see my page here.