SOCY welcomes two new faculty members!

February 9, 2018

SOCY@ VCU is pleased to announce that Gabriela León-Pérez and Ying-Chao Kao will be joining the faculty in the Fall of 2018!

Gabriela León-Pérez's research focuses on issues pertaining to international migration, the experiences of immigrants in United States, and health disparities. In her dissertation she investigates whether return U.S. migration, internal migration, and no migration experience have different effects on the health trajectories of Mexicans. Her master's thesis examined the use of Mexican health care services by residents of a community on the U.S.-Mexico border. Other research projects focus on the effects of stress and legal status on the health of immigrants, as well as the physical and mental health of patients during and after hospitalization. 

Ying-Chao Kao’s research interests include sexualities, gender and masculinities, global religions, and inequalities. His current research tracks the global flows of Christian conservative activism, exploring how Taiwanese and American pro-family organizations have shaped and mobilized the global structures to oppose the sexual citizenship of the tongzhi (LGBTQI+) people. The ongoing globalized oppositional moral movements against marriage equality and “tongzhi education” are particularly examined in the contexts of neo-liberalism, geopolitics, and hetero-hegemony. Bridging the sociological research on religion, sexualities, and transnationalism, Kao’s analysis relates sexual politics and the resurgence of global Christianity to reveal the transnational networks of social conservatism and critically examine the changes in global inequalities. Professor Kao has published his work in the journals Contexts, Sexuality Research in China, and Gender Equity Education Quarterly (in Chinese). His research on military masculinity was published in East Asian Men: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Desire (Palgrave, 2017) and Masculinities in a Global Era (Springer, 2013 and co-authored with H-D Bih). His traditional Chinese translation of Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Socio, 2016) won the Editorship Award at the Taipei International Book Exhibition in 2017.

To learn more, please visit his website: https://vcu.academia.edu/YingchaoKao