Organizers: NYU Global Philippine Studies and Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU
Description:
Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production – including film, video, and performance –between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization. Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.
Speaker:
Gina Velasco is an assistant professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching examine how gender and queer sexuality inform notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in a contemporary context of globalization. Her book, Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora was published in the Asian American Experience series of the University of Illinois Press in 2020. Queering the Global Filipina Body explores how Filipina/o American cultural production queers the Philippine nation by unsettling the gendered and sexual politics of popular and state nationalisms. Her writing has been published in the journals Amerasia Journal, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, the Review of Women's Studies and the edited collection, Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (University of Washington Press, 2018).
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