Fields:
Queer Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Cultural Studies
Research
I earned my PhD in American Studies, with a focus on comparative ethnic studies, queer theory, and urban cultural theory. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I draw on concepts, theories, and methodologies from a variety of disciples to study historical and contemporary issues pertaining to the racial and sexual organization of urban space. My dissertation articulates a queer of color conceptualization of space, time, and bodies to analyze the history of “sex panics” in the United States. Beginning with an exploration of the discursive relationship that linked a colonial geography of racial difference to domestic anxieties surrounding child sexual vulnerability in fin de siècle America and concluding with a chapter that links the moral panic surrounding cyber-predators to anxieties about the effects of Post-Fordist/post-modern digital geographies on the racial organization of public space, my dissertation argues that the history of “panic” is inextricably linked to the contradictions embedded in racial capitalism. Aside from my primary research areas, I have broad interests in food studies, popular culture, radical social movements, ethnic literatures, and transnational cultural history.
Select Publications
"Commodified Desire: Negotiating Asian American Heteronormativity," Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies 4 (2013): 46-62.
Review of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, by Karen Tongson. Journal of Asian American Studies 16.2 (2013): 228-230.