About
Victor Román Mendoza (ze/they) holds joint appointments in Women's and Gender Studies, English, and the Department of American Culture. Mendoza is also acting director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program and a faculty associate in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. 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 racial, gendered, and sexual 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.
Mendoza is not accepting new graduate students.
