Nessette Falu, PhD
Founder of Gxnecologx Justice Lab
Nessette Falu (pronouns she/her) is a Black queer feminist and cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book entitled, Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth Making in Brazil (2023, Duke University Press), argues that Black lesbians enforce wellbeing against intersectional intimate violence in gynecology, leading them to evaluate, protect, and chart their sense of worth within these spaces and draw upon their daily sense of worth making. Her current manuscript examines through a Black feminist lens the extensive sexual violence by gynecologists in the U.S. and its sociohistorical ties to the history of medicine and slavery that serves to undermine racial and gendered vulnerabilities of patients. She partners with allgo, a POC queer organization in Austin to develop community-based participatory research as part of a mentoring program with the Dell Medical School and Population Health Department at UT Austin. She holds a Master of Divinity from the New York Theological Seminary. She enjoyed a seventeen-year clinical career as a Physician Assistant in neurosurgery, internal medicine, HIV-specialty, hematology-oncology, and pain management. She loves lakes, rivers, and the ocean.