Dr. Gina Velasco

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. After receiving my Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at 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 from 2008-2010. From 2010-2011, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and a Visiting Scholar in the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley.

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, American studies, and Asian American/Filipino American studies.

My article, "El Otro Encuentro: Gigi Oltavaro-Hormillosa's 'Neo-Queer Precolonial Imagining'" was published in the Review of Women's Studies at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. My article (currently under review), "Performing the Filipina 'Mail Order Bride': Queer Neoliberalism, Affective Labor, and Homonationalism," analyzes the video art of the Filipina American performance/visual art ensemble, the Mail Order Brides.

My first book manuscript, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body, “queers” the ubiquitous figure of the Filipina body through an analysis of tropes of Filipino transnationalism within Filipino American performance, video/film, and websites. More specifically, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body explores the political possibilities and tensions between Filipino 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 Transnational Filipina Body examines the gendered and sexual politics of representing the nation within Filipino diasporic cultural production.

My current project explores the relationship between nationalisms, diasporas, and queer genders and sexualities, with a focus on the performance art of queer artists of color in the U.S. My study is contextualized within the contemporary racial and sexual politics of the U.S. I am currently collaborating with YaliniDream, a queer Sri Lankan American artist, on an essay that describes how nationalism, experiences of war, gender, and queer sexuality inform both the content and form of her performance art. This article uses a queer diasporic framework to examine the relationship between performance art, transnational political organizing, nationalist movements in the Filipino and Sri Lankan diasporas, and cultural work around issues of gender and queer sexuality. 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 U.S. racial formation, as well as the neoliberal cultural politics of a mainstream GLBT movement in the U.S. Working within both queer communities of color in the U.S. and transnational political movements across the diaspora(s), queer diasporic artists and activists have a multivalent relationship to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. It is this crucible of affective and material connections that I will explore in my study of performance art by queer diasporic artists of color U.S. I will expand this article into a book manuscript focused on how U.S.-based queer diasporic artists of color negotiate multiple political, aesthetic, and intellectual commitments in their performance art.