Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College
About
Dr. Gina Velasco is an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Gettysburg College. After receiving her PhD in the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College from 2008-2010. Her research explores how gender and queer sexuality inform notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in a contemporary context of globalization. Her writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Review of Women's Studies, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Current Work:
Dr. Velasco's first book manuscript, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body: Gendered and Sexual Nationalisms in the Filipino Diaspora, examines the gendered and sexual politics of representing the nation within Filipina/o diasporic cultural production. Queering the Transnational Filipina Body queers the ubiquitous figure of the transnational Filipina body through an analysis of several figures of Filipina/o transnationalism - the Filipina "mail order bride," the "trafficked" woman, the Filipina/o American balikbayan (expatriate), and the cyborg - within Filipina/o American performance, video/film, and websites. More broadly, this project explores the political possibilities and tensions between diasporic support for revolutionary nationalisms and feminist and queer critiques of the nation.
Her second project examines the relationship between nationalisms, diasporas, and queer genders and sexualities, with a focus on the performance and video art of queer performance and video artists of color in the US. Given the contemporary context of an ongoing global War on Terror, both the violence and the potential of the nation as an organizing principle continue to dominate queer diasporic subjects' relationship to notions of home and belonging. In addition to multi- and trans-national attachments, queer diasporic subjects must contend with the dominant US racial formation, as well as the neoliberal cultural politics of a mainstream LGBT movement in the US. It is this crucible of affective and material connections that Dr. Velasco will explore in her study of performance and video art by queer diasporic artists of color in the US.
Research Area(s):
