Member Bios

 

Sara Ahlstedt

Sara Ahlstedt is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University, Sweden. Her research examines queer partner migration to Sweden with a particular focus on affect and emotions in migration processes and how queer intimacy creates and is created by migration processes. She is particularly interested what emotions do to partner migrants and their partners and what queer migration feels like. Her work on methodological challenges in researching emotions in queer migration processes is forthcoming in the anthology Affectivity and Difference: Studying the Politics of Race, Class and Gender in the Nordic Context (Ashgate Publishing; Rikke Andreassen and Kathrine Vitus, eds).

Aren Aizura

Dr. Aren Aizura is an assistant professor in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. He previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Indiana University, Bloomington and Rutgers University. His research has focused on diverse sites: the political economies of travel for gender reassignment surgery; tracing circuits of affective labor within trans and queer migration; writing about whiteness as a shifting ideal within transnational economies of body modification in Thailand; and interrogating concepts of homonationalism, biopolitics and necropolitics as they relate to gender variant life. His articles have appeared in diverse journals and books, including Trans Gender Migrations (Routledge, 2011) and Queer Bangkok (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). He is working on a book about transsexual and transgender travel narratives and materiality, due out with Duke University Press in 2014.

Marysol Asencio

Dr. Marysol Asencio is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut-Storrs with a joint appointment in Human Development and Family Studies and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. Prior to this appointment, she was a faculty member and co-Director of the Health Promotion Disease Prevention track at the Columbia School of Public Health. Her research interests involve:

• Latina/o sexualities
• Sexual and reproductive health
• Gender
• Race/ethnicity
• Migration/trans-nationalism

Her research and community activities have been primarily with Caribbean populations in the Northeast, particularly Puerto Ricans residing in New York City and Connecticut. She has served on several advisory boards and executive committees in various organizations more recently working with the Center for Lesbian and Gays Studies (CUNY) and the Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities among Latinos in Connecticut (CEDHL). She is a founding member and the current vice-President of a non-profit organization, Connecticut Latina/os Achieving Rights and Opportunities (CLARO), devoted to Latina/ o gender and sexual rights as well as social and economic justice. She also serves on the International Editorial Board of the journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

Dr. Asencio’s research and scholarship has been funded by federal agencies and private foundations. In 2003, Dr. Asencio was awarded a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) post-doctoral sexuality research fellowship to conduct a study on migrant Puerto Rican sexual minorities. She is in the process of publishing journal articles as well as beginning a book manuscript based on the data collected. Dr. Asencio recently completed a two year Ford Foundation-funded project mapping Latina/o sexualities research in the United States. She has written a book, Sex and Sexuality among New York’s Puerto Rican Youth (Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002) as well as articles on issues related to Latina/os and/or sexuality. She is the editor of the book, Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices and Policies (Rutgers University Press, 2002).

Sandeep Bakshi

Dr. Sandeep Bakshi recently completed his PhD from the School of English at the University of Leicester, UK. His thesis examines contemporary queer fiction in English from South Asia and its diasporas. It interrupts routine practices of absorption and gradual obliteration of non-Western/non-White subjects in standard accounts of queerness and concurrently locates queer self-representation from postcolonial/diasporic South Asian writers as central to a discussion of the larger conceptual debates in queer theory. Sandeep is currently turning his PhD into a monograph. Additionally, he is working on transnational queer paradigms in academic/activist spaces in the UK and France. His research interests cover: Queer and Postcolonial Theories, Postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone Literatures, Literature, Cinema and Culture of South Asia and its Diasporas, Transgender Articulations, and Punjabi Folk Representations.

Mary Pat Brady

Dr. Mary Pat Brady is Associate Professor of English and Latino/a Studies at  Cornell University.

Robert Buffington

Dr. Robert Buffington is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has done extensive work on the histories of crime and sexuality in Mexico and Latin America. His books include:

• Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2000)
• Reconstructing Criminality in Modern Latin America (co-edited with Carlos Aguirre; Scholarly Resources, 2000)
• True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico (co-edited with Pablo Piccato; University of New Mexico Press, 2009)
• Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History (co-written with Don Coerver and Suzanne Pasztor; ABC-CLIO, 2004)
• Keen’s Latin American Civilization, 9th edition (co-edited with Lila Caimari; Westview Press, 2009)

He is currently working on a book, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: Mexico City 1900-1910, which will analyze the impact of modernity on working-class masculinities. He is also co-editing with Donna Guy, A Global History of Sexuality (Blackwell) to which we will also contribute a chapter on sex-trafficking. He recently finished an essay titled, “Gender, Sexuality, and Mexican Migration” (co-written with Eithne Luibhéid), in Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, ed., Beyond the Border: The History of Mexico-U.S. Migration. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Margot Canaday

Dr. Margot Canaday is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. Her first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009) examines immigration policy — alongside military and welfare policy — to ask how homosexuality came to be a meaningful category for the federal state over the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Canaday received her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. From 2005 to 2008, she was a member of the Princeton University Society of Fellows.

Héctor Carrillo

Dr. Héctor Carrillo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.

Karma R. Chávez

Dr. Karma Chávez is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press, 2012), and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013), The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021), and Palestine on the Air (U of Illinois P, 2019). Karma is a member of the radical queer collective Against Equality, and for years was also on the organizing collective for LGBT Books to Prisoners, and a host for 89.9 FM WORT’s weekly radio program, A Public Affair.

Hugo Córdova Quero

Dr. Hugo Córdova Quero holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion, Migration and Ethnic Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He holds a Master’s in Divinity from ISEDET University in Buenos Aires (1998), and a Master of Arts in Systematic Theology and Critical Theories (Feminist, Queer, and Post-Colonial) from the Graduate Theological Union (2003). Currently he is Adjunct Faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry (SKSM), the Graduate Theological Union, and Researcher at the Program on «Multiculturalism, Migration, and Inequality in Latin America» co-supported by The Center for Advanced Studies at the National University of Cordoba (CEA-UNC) and by The Research Center for the Study of Cultures and Societies of the National Council of Science and Technology of Argentina (CIECS-
CONICET).

Dr. Córdova Quero has been Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study of Asian Cultures and Theologies (IASACT), Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006); Visiting Researcher at the Center for Lusophone Studies (2006–2009) and Postdoctoral Visiting Researcher at the Iberoamerican Institute (2009–2011) both at Sophia University in Tokyo. His areas of research are religious studies and queer theologies, migration and ethnic studies, critical theories (feminist, queer and post-colonial), cultural studies, and geography of religion. He is also a member of the research groups EQARS and GEMRIP. He is coeditor of Sociedade Japonesa e Migrantes Brasileiros: Novos Caminhos na Formação de uma Rede de Pesquisadores [Japanese society and Brazilian migrants: New pathways in the formation of a researchers network] (Center for Lusophone Studies/Sophia University, 2008), Transnational Faiths: Latin-American Migrants and Their Religions in Japan (Ashgate, 2014), and the forthcoming volume Queering Migrations
Towards, From, and Beyond Asia (Palgrave MacMillan, October 2014).

Debanuj DasGupta

Debanuj DasGupta is an assistant professor in the Departments of Geography and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Debanuj’s research interrogates racial regulation, queer immigrant activist narratives, and queer/crip futurities. His work interrogates the multi-scalar incursion of borders within US private sphere, along with trans/border travel of LGBT rights rhetoric. He has worked for over 16 years across two continents in the “civil society sector.” In 1994 Debanuj founded the first HIV prevention program for men-who-have-sex-with-men in Kolkata, India. His work in the US has largely been within the environmental rights, sexual rights and immigrant rights movements. Debanuj was on the founding board of the Queer Immigrant Rights Project. In this capacity he helped organize over 300 LGBT immigrants from 52 countries residing in the New York Tri-State area. As the New Voices Fellow/Immigration Policy Analyst, Debanuj worked with Queers For Economic Justice, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and several local Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer identified Immigrant rights formations across the US to lead the campaign to remove the US HIV ban on travel and immigration.

Debanuj has received numerous grants, awards and fellowships notably the Association of American Geographers T.J.Reynolds Award for Disability Studies (2013 & 2012), The Space, Sexualities, and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society-Institute of British Geographers Scholarship towards attending RGS-IBG ( 2012), Arts & Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant from the Ohio State University (2011), Ford Foundation / Academy for Educational Development funded New Voices Fellowship (2006), The British Department for International Development-West Bengal Sexual Health Project Multi-Year Award (1995-1998), Graduate Research Fellowships from the University of Akron (1996-1998), and The International AIDS Society Fellowships for Emerging Activists (1996). Debanuj holds a B.A. in Sociology (HONS) from Presidency College, Kolkata (now the Presidency Autonomous University), and an MA in Geography & Urban Planning from the University of Akron, OH. Debanuj’s work has been published in the Scholar & Feminist Online, South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR), make/shift, and the WhiteCrane Journal.

Brad Epps

Dr. Brad Epps is Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.  He has published nearly a hundred articles and chapters on modern literature, film, art, architecture, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia, the United States, and France and is the author of:

• Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (co-edited with Luis Fernández Cifuentes; Bucknell University Press, 2005)
• Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (co-edited with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens; Harvard University Press, 2005)
• All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (co-edited with Despina Kakoudaki: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
• A special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and modernity
• Aspecial issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig.

He has taught as visiting professor or scholar in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid), Germany, France, Chile, Cuba, the Netherlands, and Sweden.  He is fitfully preparing two books: The Ethics of Promiscuity and Barcelona and Cinema.

Eda Farsakoglu

Eda Farsakoglu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a doctoral researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her broad areas of interest encompass international migration and refugee studies, feminist and qualitative methodology, gender and sexuality, as well as a number of sub-topics of political sociology including the study of social movements, globalization, transnationalization processes and (anti-)militarism. Eda holds a MA in Global Studies from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and a BS in Sociology from Middle East Technical University, Turkey.

Her doctoral work is centered on the interplay of gender, sexuality and international migration, in particular within the context of asylum migrations. She is particularly interested in understanding the sexuality of asylum by focusing on “power geometries” and normativities concerning queer asylum. Her dissertation is concerned with the everyday life worlds and migratory experiences of queer asylum-seeking migrants who come from Iran and seek refugee asylum in Turkey. It is multi-sited ethnographic research following the lives and experiences of Iranian queers throughout their asylum-seeking migrations and in different geographical sites. Theoretically, Eda`s work draws on postcolonial, queer and feminist approaches to asylum, displacement, migrations, identities, belonging, and everyday life.

 Anne-Marie Fortier

Dr. Anne-Marie Fortier is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. Engaging with critical race studies, feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, her work attends to how communities of belonging and entitlement are configured. Her work has centered on:

• Emigré cultures
• Queer diasporas
• Multiculturalist nationalism (and multicultural intimacies)
• Affective citizenship

Her current research interests are twofold: the citizenship naturalization process in Britain, and the use of genetic genealogies to formulate and stabilize ideas of collective identities. She is the author of Migrant Belongings (Berg, 2000), Multicultural Horizons (Routledge, 2008), Uprootings/Regroundings (co-edited with Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, and Mimi Sheller; Berg, 2003), and several journal articles.

Linda Sólveigar Guðmundsdóttir

Linda Sólveigar Guðmundsdóttir is a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland (part-time), Department of Social Anthropology. She has a background in sociology and gender studies, and a somewhat of a long-standing interest in LGBTQ related issues, social change and activism. Her MA research was conducted in London in 2009 and is called, “Degrees of Outness: Motherhood, Work and Lesbian identity.”

The working title of her PhD project is, “Queer Immigrants in Iceland: Disclosure, Identity and Belonging.” The main goal of this research project is to examine queer migrants’ experiences of living in Iceland, and place their narratives in a global and historical perspective. The research seeks to examine whether living in Iceland makes it in some way easier for participants to deal with their sexual orientation. It aims at understanding how gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and class overlap and shape queer migrants experiences, through the migration process and their daily life. The research is for example based on theories of intersectionality and transnationalism, as well as on writings on queer migration and queer diaspora. The study will combine the fields of queer studies and migration studies, which is a novelty in the Icelandic context.

Cathy Hannabach

Dr. Cathy Hannabach is an interdisciplinary scholar of queer and sexuality studies, transnational feminist cultural studies, and film and media studies, and is based in Philadelphia. She is the founder of Ideas on Fire, an academic publishing and consulting agency helping interdisciplinary, progressive academics write and publish. She has taught a number of courses on queer asylum, citizenship, and transnational mobilities that foreground the practices and politics of migration.

Recent research projects include a book manuscript called Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms which is a cultural history of blood as it was mobilized across 20th century U.S. medicine, militarisms, and popular culture. It examines the ways that blood has saturated the cultural imaginary and argues that blood has in fact been central to how U.S. national identity has been made and remade in the context of imperialism and war, specifically by braiding medicine together with military logics and popular media practices such as film and television. Journal articles from that project include ” “Technologies of Blood: Asylum, Medicine, and Biopolitics” (forthcoming in Cultural Politics) and “Blood Wars: Security, States, and Sanguine Futures” (forthcoming in Social Text: Periscope) which analyze the intertwining of U.S. military and policing practices with medical technologies, and they way they discipline immigrant bodies Her current book project–Unruly Bodies: Disability, Queerness, and the Politics of Excess–examines the ways a variety of embodiments are positioned as “excessive” in relation to contemporary neoliberal logics, and the ways various biopolitical technologies are employed to construct, surveil, and manage those bodies and their attendant populations. Her website is: cathyhannabach.com

Jin Haritaworn

Dr. Jin Haritaworn is on the faculty of Enivronmental Studies at York University in Toronto and has worked on queer/trans politics, racism and migration for the last decade or so, first as an activist and more recently as an academic. Besides turning a PhD on Thai multiraciality and queer diaspora into a manuscript, Jin is also working on a monograph (contracted in the Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons Pluto series) about the racial and religious turn in gender and sexual politics. Of particular interest are the transnational travels of racist, neo-colonial and neoliberal paradigms through Europe and across the Atlantic, and the queer necropolitics of urban space and LGBT hate crime activism in Western Europe. Jin currently examines this with regard to the gentrification of the inner cities and the criminalization and pathologization of the people once confined to, and now displaced from, them.

Selected articles and chapters have appeared in special issues of Social Justice Journal (Sexuality, criminalization and social control), Feminist Legal Studies (Liabilities of Queer Anti-racist Critique) and Darkmatter (Postcolonial Sexuality), as well as book collections such as Transatlantic Conversations (eds. Davis/Evans, with Paola Bacchetta), Trans-Migrations (ed. Trystan Cotten), Decolonising European Sociology (eds. Boatc/Costa/Gutierrez Rodriguez) and Out of Place (eds. Kuntsman/Miyake). Collections co/edited by Jin include a special focus on gay and women’s discourse and anti-Muslim racism in European Journal of Women’s Studies (forthcoming), a book co-edited with Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco called Queer Necropolitics, and a special issue on polyamory (Sexualities Journal, with Christian Klesse and Chin-ju Lin).

Maja Horn

Dr. Maja Horn is Assistant Professor of Spanish & Latin American Cultures at Barnard College. She received her B.A. in Latin American Literature from Smith College in 1998, an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU in 2002, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Cornell University in 2005. Before joining Barnard faculty in 2006, she was a research associate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she developed and taught a performance studies specialization. Her research focuses on Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic literature, visual arts and performance and theories of gender and sexuality. She is currently completing a manuscript on post-dictatorship Dominican literature and political culture.

Adi Kuntsman

Dr. Adi Kuntsman is based at the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of Manchester. Her work bridges several fields: queer migration and diaspora, Russian and post-Soviet studies, new media studies, and social anthropology. Adi is the author of Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (Peter Lang, 2009) and Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (co-edited with Esperanza Miyake, Raw Nerve Books, 2008). Adi’s research interests include:

• Affect and emotions
• Migration
• Diaspora and nationalism
• Queer racisms
• Digital media

Larry La Fountain-Stokes

Dr. Larry La Fountain-Stokes is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan.

Edward Ou Jin Lee

Edward Ou Jin Lee is presently a doctoral student at the McGill School of Social Work in Montreal, Canada. Ed’s doctoral project examines the social organisation of queer migrations through the everyday lives of queer and trans migrants with precarious status. Ed’s area of interest is the relationship between sexuality and migration, in particular within the context of colonialisms. Grounded in anti-oppression and critical race feminism, Ed engages in community, media and participatory-based research methodologies. Ed also served as the coordinator for an LGBTQ refugee research project, alongside principal investigator Dr. Shari Brotman (associate professor at the McGill School of Social Work). Ed is presently teaching anti-oppression and queer migration oriented courses at McGill and Concordia University. As a scholar-activist, Ed is involved in a number of community-based initiatives, including Qouleur (arts-based queer and trans people of colour collective) and AGIR (a community organization which focuses on supporting queer and trans migrants).

Eithne Luibhéid

Dr. Eithne Luibhéid is a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of:

• Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
• Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
• Co-editor of a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum on “Representing Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.” (2004)
• Co-editor of Queer Migration: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (with Lionel Cantú, Jr., University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
• Editor of a special issue of GLQ on “Queer/Migration” (2008)
• Various articles and book chapters that explore intersections among sexuality, migration, and inequality.

Yasmin Nair

Dr. Yasmin Nair is a Chicago-based writer, activist, academic, and commentator. The bastard child of queer theory and deconstruction, Nair has numerous critical essays, book reviews, investigative journalism, op-eds, and photography to her credit. Her work has appeared in publications like:

• GLQ
• The Progressive
• make/shift
• Time Out Chicago
• The Bilerico Project
• Windy City Times
• Bitch
• Maximum Rock’n’Roll
• No More Potlucks

Nair’s writing and organizing address issues like neoliberalism and inequality, queer politics and theory, the politics of rescue and affect, sex trafficking, the art world, and the immigration crisis. Nair is part of the editorial collective of Against Equality; she wrote the introduction and contributed to their first book, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage. She is also a member of the Chicago grassroots organisation Gender JUST (Justice United for Societal Transformation) and was, from 1999-2003, a member of the now-defunct group Queer to the Left. She has worked on several grassroots immigration campaigns and projects in Chicago, and was a key writer of the Queers for Economic Justice project, Queers and Immigration: A Vision Statement. Her current immigration work includes research and activism on and around undocumented sex workers and youth. Nair is currently working on a book about affect and neoliberalism, tentatively titled Feeling Bad.

Nancy A. Naples

Dr. Nancy A. Naples is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research has been published in numerous journals including:

• Journal of Latino/a-Latin American Studies
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
• National Women’s Studies Association Journal
• Women & Politics
• Social Politics
• Feminist Economics

She is author of Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work and the War on Poverty (Routledge, 1998) and Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis and Activist Scholarship (Routledge, 2003). She is also editor of Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender (Routledge, 1998) and co-editor of Teaching Feminist Activism (with Karen Bojar, Routledge 2002); Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles with Transnational Politics (with Manisha Desai, Routledge, 2002); and The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossing and Mexican Immigrant Men (with Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, New York University Press, 2009). She is currently working on a new book, Restructuring the Heartland: Racialization and Social Regulation of Citizenship, that investigates the link between global economic change, social policy, and community-based social restructuring in the rural United States.

Nancy Ordover

Dr. Nancy Ordover is the author of American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). In 2006, Ordover co-founded the Coalition to Lift the Bar, an alliance of LGBT, human rights, immigrant justice, and HIV/AIDS organizations that waged a successful campaign to overturn the US ban on entry, residence, and stay for HIV-positive people. Ordover has also served on the International Task Team on HIV-Related Travel Restrictions, convened by UNAIDS and concerned with issues relating to the health, human rights, and economic impact(s) of HIV entry bars on immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylees, detainees, and other mobile populations. Ordover earned a PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and did a post-doc (Rockefeller Residency Fellowship) at Columbia University’s Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights. While still in San Francisco, Ordover served on the editorial collective of Socialist Review, a nonsectarian journal concerned with issues of public policy, cultural dissent, and political economy. For several years, Ordover taught Urban Studies at the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center in Manhattan, a program borne of collaboration between the City University of New York and local labor unions, designed for rank and file union members working toward their BAs and MAs.

Susana Peña

Dr. Susana Peña is the Director of Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research focuses on sexuality and gender among U.S. Latino/a populations. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include:

• Oye Loca: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
• “Latina/o Sexualities in Motion.” Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices and Policies.  Ed. Marysol Asencio. (Rutgers University Press, 2010)
• “‘Obvious’ Gays and the State Gaze: Cuban Gay Visibility and U.S. Immigration Policy during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.”  Journal of the History of Sexuality 16:3 (2007): 482-513
• “Oye Loca: Las identidades y la cultura masculina gay cubano-americana,” in the Cuban journal Temas (1998)

She received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program. Her book manuscript entitled Oye Loca: The Making of Cuban American Gay Miami is currently under contract with University of Minnesota Press.

Erica Rand

Dr. Erica Rand is a Professor in Art and Visual Culture and in Women and Gender Studies at Bates College. She studies sexuality, race, and gender in contemporary culture — with particular attention to queer and trans sexualities and genders. Her publications related to queer migration issues include The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Duke University Press, 2005), and, with Deborah Bright, “Queer Plymouth,” GLQ 12 (2006). She is also the author of Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Duke University Press, 1995) and is working on a book currently titled Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice, grounded in participant-observation research in adult figure skating. She serves on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher, Criticism, and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine.

Gayatri Reddy

Dr. Gayatri Reddy is an Associate Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research lies at the intersections of sexuality, gender, health, and the politics of subject-formation in India, and more recently, within the immigrant South Asian queer community in the U.S. She is the author of With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2005), an ethnography that problematizes representations of hijras as the so-called ‘third sex’ of India and challenges the sufficiency of sexuality and gender performativity as adequate glosses on hijra identification. Her research locates such figures of sexual difference, and the domain of sexuality more generally, within a broader field of social difference, exploring the intersections of gender and sexuality with religion, race, ethnicity, and class in South Asia and its diaspora.

Tracy Simmons

Dr. Tracy Simmons is a Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Her research has been concerned with sexual citizenship and immigration, which had been the focus of her doctorate research entitled: ‘Akin to Marriage’: Sexual Citizenship, Heterosexism and Immigration in the UK (2003). This research examined the development of ‘Unmarried Partners’ legislation in UK immigration policy, which involved interviewing same-sex couples on their experiences of using this legislation. This research can be seen in “Sexuality and immigration: UK family reunion policy and the regulation of sexual citizens in the European Union.” Political Geography 27:2 (2008): 213-230; and “Skills, Sexual Citizens and the UK’s Family Reunion Provision” in Dialogue Section of Feminist Review, August (2004): 77. She has also published more broadly on the intersections between globalization and sexuality in “The Global Politics of Sexual Dissidence, Migration and Diaspora.” (co-written with Jon Binnie) in E. Kofman and G. Youngs, eds. Globalization: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. (Continuum, 2008).

Omise’eke Tinsley

Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz

Dr. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at American University.

Melissa Autumn White

Dr. Melissa Autumn White is Faculty Lecturer in the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (IGSF) at McGill University.  Her research on queer migration has been published or is forthcoming in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Radical History Review;  and Sexualities; as well as in the edited collections Transnationalism, Activism, Art (eds. Dobson and McGlynn) and Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America (eds. Sisson Runyan, LInd, Marchand and McDermott).  She is also co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Mobile Desires: The Erotics and Politics of Mobility Justice, forthcoming with Palgrave’s new ‘Pivot’ series in Mobility and Politics (with Liz Montegary).

Chiou-Ling Yeh

Dr. Chiou-Ling Yeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at San Diego State University.  She is the author of Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2008). She also has authored several articles on transnational cold war politics, ethnic identity formation, youth activism, and sexuality. She is currently working on two projects: one is on race, sexuality, and law and the other is on cold war propaganda.

Audrey Yue

Dr. Audrey Yue is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), and co-editor of AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Asia (Duke University Press, 2003). She is currently completing a book project on queer Asian migrations, and her essays in this field have been published in GLQ, Sexualities, Journal of Australasian Cinema and Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (Ashgate, 2009). She is an editorial board member of Feminist Media Studies, Sexualities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Metro Screen Education, as well as a Ministerial Appointment to the State Government of Victoria’s Multicultural Arts Policy Advisory Committee. She is currently Chief Investigator in three current Australian Research Council-funded projects on Asian Australian cinema (2009-2011, DP0987349), transnational large screens (2009-2012, LP0989302) and multicultural arts governance (2011-2015, LPIIOI00039).

Photos by: Karma Chávez, Anne Demo, and Sara McKinnon