About
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
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.
