Victor Román Mendoza

Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and English Ph.D., English and American Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2007

Contact Information:
1238 Lane Hall
204 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1290
734.647.0772
Email: vmendoza@umich.edu

Scholarly Interests: queer of color critique, queer studies, critical race theory, transnational feminist and gender studies, postcolonial studies, cultures of U.S. imperialism, Asian American literature and culture, ethnic American literature and culture, visual cultures, modernisms

Biography: Victor Mendoza's research examines the mutually constitutive formations of race, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth-century United States, as inflected by its colonial and neocolonial occupation of the Philippines. His first book project, Fantasy Islands, argues that these processes of social management in the U.S.--racial formation, gender performativity, and sexual regulation--involve the nation's negotiating of popular cultural fantasies not only about the imagined colonized Philippine Other vis-a-vis other deviant ethnic American and colonized peoples, but also the white, heterosexual, colonial subject. Fantasy Islands thus intervenes into critical discussions about the historical intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class in U.S. cultural production by examining how the U.S.'s unprecedented colonial projects overseas starting at the turn of the century impacted the management of human categorization within the nation. Victor's next research project stays at interdisciplinary crossings of critical race theory, transnational feminist studies, and queer studies but moves towards the contemporary moment. This next project examines how, via neoliberalism, homonormativity and multiculturalism are circulated between the U.S. metropole and Southeast Asian cultural spaces.

Publications:

Fantasy Islands: Illicit Desires and the Philippines in American Imperialism (book manuscript in progress) 

"Little Brown Students and the Homoerotics of White Love," Asian American Subgenres: 1853-1941. Ed. Hsuan Hsu. Spec. double issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:4 (winter 2006): 65-83. 

"'Come Buy': The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," ELH (formerly English Literary History) 73:4 (December 2006): 913-47. 

"A Queer Nomadology of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters," American Literature 77:4 (December 2005): 815-845. 

Reviews: Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Journal of Asian American Studies.(February 2009): 128-132.