Gina Velasco

I am an Associate Professor and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Haverford College. After receiving my Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College.  I have been a Visiting Scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. I am a member of the board of trustees and a former grantee (2007-08) of the Davis Putter Scholarship Fund, which provides grants to radical student-activists.

My research and teaching explore how gender and queer sexuality inform notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in a contemporary context of globalization. My research, writing, and teaching encompass a range of fields, including queer studies, feminist theory, transnational feminisms, women of color feminisms, diaspora studies, ethnic studies, and Asian American/Filipina/o American studies.  My writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Amerasia Journal, the Review of Women's Studies, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (University of Washington 2018).

My book, Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora (University of Illinois Press,  2020), “queers” the ubiquitous figure of the global Filipina body through an analysis of several figures of Filipina/o transnationalism - the Filipina "mail order bride," the "trafficked" woman/sex worker, the Filipina/o American balikbayan (expatriate), and the cyborg - within Filipina/o American performance, video/film, websites, and a heritage language program. Queering the Global Filipina Body explores the political possibilities and tensions between diasporic support for revolutionary nationalisms and feminist and queer critiques of the nation.  Offering a serious consideration of the political potential of revolutionary, diasporic nationalisms as a form of resistance to U.S. imperialism and capitalist globalization, Queering the Global Filipina Body both unsettles and reimagines the gendered and sexual politics of representing the nation within Filipina/o diasporic cultural production. 

For more information about my research and teaching, visit www.ginakvelasco.com.
Supervisors: Anjali Arondekar, James Clifford, Donna Haraway, and Neferti Tadiar