Victor Mendoza

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color photograph of Victor Mendoza
Job Title: 
Program Director, Colonialism, Race, and Sexualities Initiative; Associate Professor of Women's Studies and English Language and Literature, LSA
Office Address Line 1: 
1122 Lane Hall
Email Address: 
vmendoza@umich.edu
Phone Number: 
734-763-2047
Job Title: 
Program Director, Colonialism, Race, and Sexualities Initiative; Associate Professor of Women's Studies and English Language and Literature, LSA
Office Address Line 1: 
1122 Lane Hall
Email Address: 
vmendoza@umich.edu
Phone Number: 
734-763-2047

Victor Román Mendoza holds a joint appointment in Women's 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. Mendoza's first book, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913 was recently published by Duke University Press, in the "Perverse Modernities" Series, edited by Lisa Lowe and J. Halberstam. The monograph is also one of ten books selected for inclusion in a pilot project by Knowledge Unlatched (knowledgeunlatched.org), a global library consortium providing open access to academic titles, and is under contract for reprint at the University of Philippines Press. Mendoza's second book project, Extimate Attachments: Colonianormativity, Racial Minorities, and the Future of Imperial Citizenship traces how varied racial minorities living within the U.S. metropolitan center at the turn of the twentieth century reimagined and reshaped their intimacies to accord with what was happening in the U.S. imperial exterior. Mendoza is also co-editing the fourth volume in a forthcoming Cambridge University Press series, Asian American Literature in Transition (general editors Min Song and Rajini Srikanth).

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.