Alan Michael Williams

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];
“Soon-Tek Oh’s Tondemonai—Never Happen! as Queer Cultural Nationalism,” in Interventions: Asian American Rhetorical Commonplaces Across Time and Space, 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 proto-homonationalism. (The JAAS article also reconsiders Lonny Kaneko's 1976 "The Shoyu Kid" as a queer cultural nationalist text.) The article and issue cover feature surprising archival stage photography!

“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]

I interrogate W. E. B. Du Bois' political ontology in the context of the emergence of liberal pluralism (1920s–50s) in the entangled US and Japanese empires. Foregrounding Du Bois' 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.

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

I theorize the proliferation of yaoi or Boys' Love (BL) media (a feminist-queer multimedia genre) in East Asia. 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];
“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, 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, 221-231. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. [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.
Google Scholar page.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse