Browse

A transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism, this book focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy. It unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, the book formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, the book follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, the book addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around “Asian performance”.

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. This book uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts. Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th-century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—the book employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the book renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, it proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. The book is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.

A Taste for Brown Bodies asks what difference race makes in the emergence of gay modernity. The book examines how the romanticization of the “brown body” continues to shape modern gay sensibilities, tracing that brown body to the nostalgic imagination of gay cosmopolitanism. In so doing, the book looks in particular to the queer masculinities of three figures: the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy, themselves proletariat cosmopolitans of sorts. All three of these figures have functioned, officially and unofficially, as cosmopolitan extensions of the US nation-state and as agents for the expansion of its borders and neocolonial zones of influence. The book considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. US empire not only makes possible certain articulations of gay modernity but also instrumentalizes them. The book argues that certain practices and subjectivities understood historically as forms of homosexuality are regulated and normalized in their service to US empire. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st  centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—the book proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism.

In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? This book provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—the book delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, it considers what might have been lost in the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, the book assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, the book fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.