Victor Mendoza

Victor Román Mendoza (ze/they) holds a joint appointment in Women's and Gender Studies and English, and is a faculty associate in the Department of American Culture, the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, at the Univeristy of Michigan. Mendoza's first book, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913 (Duke University Press 2015; University of Philippines Press 2016) showed how the management of Philiippine sexuality was constitutive of imperial-colonial conquest and how the colonization of the Philippines is integral to the history of sexuality in the United States. The monograph was a finalist for the 2017 Philippines National Book Award (History category). Mendoza's second book project, Extimate Attachments: Colonianormativity, Racial Minorities, and the Promise of Imperial Citizenship traces how various racialized subjects living within the U.S. metropolitan center at the turn of the twentieth century reimagined and reshaped their intimacies in response to what was happening in the U.S. imperial exterior. Mendoza is also the co-editor, with Betsy Huang, of Asian American Literature in Transition, Vol 4. (Cambridge University Press 2021), winner of a Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" award (2022).

Other research interests: A third research project, which currently takes the form of several articles, explores the legacies of those histories in the contemporary moment and in various postcolonial sites, embodied most distinctly in international LGBTQ activist discourses. The objects of analysis in this research project include laws, legal cases, military documents, activist discourse, news coverage, social media, literary works, and film. Nations in the Global South have been contested sites for western (predominantly U.S.- and Western European-based) lesbian and gay activists and non-governmental organizations, who characterize these countries as either modern or pre-modern because of their tolerance, punishment, or neglect of same-sex sexual actors. This project examines a trend that persists in this western-based activist discourse: the privileging of dissident sexual identities as the quintessential marker of freedom and modernity.

Classes Taught

• Multiethnic Literature in the U.S. before Multiculturalism; English 473 (Topics in American
  Literature)
• Race, Sex, U.S. Empire: Cultures of U.S. Imperialism; Women’s Studies 435 / English 414 (Advanced Topics in Gender in a Global Context)
• Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Empire in Asian American Cultural Production; Women’s Studies 344/English 314/American Culture 301 (Special topics in Gender, Culture, & Representation)
• Asian American Women Writers; English 315/WS 315, American Culture 311
• Asian American Cultural Production; English 630/American Culture 601 (Graduate Seminar)
• Twentieth Century Writing by U.S. Women Writers of Color; Women’s Studies 293 / American Culture 293
• Feminist Thought; Women’s Studies 330
• Introduction to LGBTQ Studies; Women’s Studies 245
• LGBTQ Studies; Women’s Studies 531 (Graduate Seminar)
• Queer of Color Critique; WS 698 (Graduate Seminar)
• Asian American Literature; English 381/American Culture 324