Gina Velasco

Candidate statement

I am an assistant professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gettysburg College. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. My research and teaching examine how gender and queer sexuality inform contemporary notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in Filipinx American cultural production. My book, Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora , explores how Filipinx American cultural production queers the Philippine nation by unsettling the gendered and sexual politics of popular and state nationalisms. I have written numerous articles, including essays in Amerasia Journal and Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics.

I first attended AAAS as an undergraduate, as part of a student-activist organization that successfully fought to establish Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, AAAS has been an intellectual home for me. I am especially committed to mentoring graduate and undergraduate students. I organized an AAAS workshop on the academic job market and I served as a panelist on an AAAS mentorship session, in addition to participating in the Filipinx Studies and Queer Studies sections. If elected, I will build collaborations between Asian American studies scholars at small liberal arts colleges and research institutions, including opportunities for mentorship of graduate students.