Teaching

My teaching philosophy fosters spaces where students can connect feminist scholarship with real-world situations. To achieve this, I prioritize a human-centered approach to education and emphasize community-engaged learning. Drawing upon my teaching and research experience, I have also come to deeply value cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations, both inside and outside classrooms. I teach courses addressing gender-based violence, transnational feminism(s), reproductive justice, East Asian societies, global popular culture, and feminist and qualitative research methodologies.

In Fall 2025, I will teach "Inequalities and Global Popular Culture" and "Everyday Feminisms: Gender, Technology, and Resistance in East Asia."

Below is the course description and highlights of the courses I taught.

Introduction to Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies

What is gender? What is sexuality? Are these categories inborn or a product of society? How are gender and sexuality interconnected with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, migration status, and languages? These are the central questions at the heart of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. This introductory course aims to tackle these questions through a life course approach. We will collectively “experience” how gender, race, and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed, from children’s play and educational experiences to formal and informal employment in various workplaces, intimate relationships and family, and reproduction and parenting. Remember: this is not a “standard” life course for any individual. In each of these realms, we examine sexuality, race, and gender on multiple levels, from interpersonal interactions to systematic inequalities. Additionally, and maybe most importantly, gender or any social category is always contingent, depending on the historical, political, cultural, and economic, and national context. Consequently, this course explores gender and sexuality in a global setting and from a cross-cultural perspective.

We all have a gender, sexual, and racial identity. Thus, this course is crucial for every person to understand the world around us and our positions in it. We are interested not only in your understanding and command of the course material but also in your ability to apply these frameworks to analyzing our current times and politics and your own lives.

Feminism and Pop Culture

Why does Nami in One Piece always wear a bikini top? Why did the news that Hallie Bailey was going to play the role of the little mermaid raise heated discussion on social media? What message does Beyoncé’s Lemonade convey? Or, in general, how does pop culture reinforce and/or challenge race, gender, and sexuality norms? And, what messages do we receive from pop culture about the “correct” ways to live our lives in a specific society? Those are the questions that we will discuss in this course.

This course is interested in honing the critical skills necessary to analyze the pop culture that surrounds us every day. This course takes as a foundational assumption that we still live in a world where, while there may be some improvement, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are alive and well. As such, the pop culture produced and consumed in different societies plays a part in those systems of oppression and domination. At the same time, pop culture can also be used as a powerful tool to challenge those systems. With the popularity of Internet-based social media, the problematic and innovative portrayals of the gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies in pop culture transcend national and cultural boundaries. We will explore the social construction of gender, sexuality, and race in pop culture from different societies.

Popular culture items students made in the Feminist and Popular Culture class that aimed to challenge the problematic presentations of gender, race, sexuality, and class in global popular culture.

Gender-based Violence

“We did not even have a word for domestic violence. It was just called life. Now we understand that it is not natural, it is not normal, it is not inevitable.” (Gloria Steinem 2013)

This course will examine gender-based violence (GBV) from a feminist perspective. You will be introduced to a myriad of domestic and international GBV issues, from interpersonal violence (i.e., pornography, sex work, human trafficking, rape, and intimate partner violence) to structural violence (i.e., GBV in conflict areas, honor killing, genital mutilation, and forced marriage). The course is contextualized in Crenshaw's perspective of intersectionality. GBV is understood as occurring in a social context of power, dominance, and control as a co-factor of gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, sexuality, nationality, and other variables. The seminar is designed to enhance students' understanding of important GBV research topics and scholarly debates, and furthermore, facilitate the application of this knowledge to real-world settings. We will discuss ongoing controversies about the causes and effects of GBV and examine the sociological, cultural, political, and legal discourses surrounding these issues. The GBV seminar is composed of seminar sessions on Tuesdays and lab sessions on Thursdays. In the lab sessions, we will work collectively to complete the “Contemporary Underground Railway” project using digital mapping.

Screenshot of one of the digital maps students in the Gender-based Violence seminar made that investigated the domestic violence services in the deep South.

Transnational Asian and Asian American Feminisms

This seminar explores how Asian people of different genders have historically and contemporarily engaged with feminist thought and activism and navigated systemic disparities within their communities and in transnational contexts, as well as their daily lives and experiences. Geographically, we focus on societies influenced by Confucian gender norms, specifically those of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In this course, we examine both the intergender differences and the intragender variations. We will start with theoretical and historical foundations and then explore topics such as gendered popular culture, workplace, and family.

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