Alan Michael Williams - Academic publications

“A Neglected Queer Play Hidden in Plain Sight: Soon-Tek Oh's Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970),” Journal of Asian American Studies 28, no. 2 (2025): 197–229. [link] [AI summary];
“Soon-Tek Oh’s Tondemonai—Never Happen! as Queer Cultural Nationalism,” in Interventions in Asian/American Rhetoric, eds. Amy Wan and Morris Young, forthcoming. [link to come]

The Korean American actor Soon-Tek Oh's 1970 queer play about the Japanese American incarceration, produced by East West Players, is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. It offers an opportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalism, targeting both racial castration and what I refer to as US "proto-homonationalism." The JAAS article also reconsiders Lonny Kaneko's classic 1976 short story "The Shoyu Kid" as a queer cultural nationalist text. The issue cover and article feature surprising archival stage photography from the 1970 production!

“Queering the Color Line within the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Transwar Transpacific,” American Studies 61, no. 4 (2022): 31–63. [link] [abstract] [AI summary]

I interrogate W. E. B. Du Bois' political ontology in the context of the emergence of liberal pluralism (1910s–50s) in the entangled US and Japanese empires. Expounding Du Bois' underanalyzed concept of a "color line within a color line," I contest framings of him as an "Afro-Orientalist" and simple apologist of Japanese empire, instead highlighting his interpretive overlap with pan-Asianism from below, particularly that of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Further, I unpack how Du Bois' 1928 novel Dark Princess is a work of queer praxis prefiguring queer regionalist critique. Du Bois didn't just consider the "color line," but the even trickier problem of what comes after its facade begins to fade.

“Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (2015). [link] [AI summary]

I theorize yaoi or Boys' Love (BL) media in East Asia, thinking through its proliferation, post/modernity, feminism and affect. My concept of "brand homonationalism" that links Kōichi Iwabuchi's "brand nationalism" and Jasbir Puar's "homonationalism" has been taken up by scholars of the genre.

“Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 1 (2011): 53–84. [link] [AI summary];
“The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights,” Religion Dispatches, March 27, 2013. [link]

My earlier work engaged the intersection of US LGBTQ politics, identity and conservative religion, namely Mormonism, in the lead-up to the 2015 US legalization of same-sex marriage. In my 2011 article, deploying the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick, I analyze paradigm shifts in Mormon discourse on homosexuality and gender from the 1950s through the 2000s. In my 2013 commentary, I contend with how LGBTQ civil rights politicking has been insufficient because of how the US state shores up difference in the interests of private property, including for spheres in which same-sex intimacy remains a "sin."

“Raping Apollo: Sexual Difference and the Yaoi Phenomenon,” in Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, eds. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliassotti (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 221-231. [link]

Positioning myself as an aca-fan, I explore yaoi/BL as political, non/heteronormative, transnational, and homophobic, using feminist theories of sexual difference.

If you hit a paywall, copies of all my research are available on my Academia.edu page.
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ORCID page.

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