Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The identity “gay Asian male” (GAM) is proposed and contested in online personal ads, where ethnicity and other visible traits are used to describe individuals as attractive suitors and request or refuse potential partners. This paper explores the relationship between identity and desire, focusing on representations of GAM in craigslist ads, a site where men seek men for sexual encounters. In particular, it considers GAM as constructed by cultural meanings derived from characteristics set by HIV/AIDS prevention literature. This paper considers why identities matter: from the descriptions created by scholars and the media, to how individuals use them on a daily basis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Freudian drive theory is used to examine the rhetoric of historical witch-hunt texts, tracing a rhetoric of demonic heteronormativity and fear of anality from the fifteenth century to contemporary "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy. The essay shows how dominant cultural norms that forbid people to embrace their innate anality can have vicious and violent social consequences.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper documents the acute gendering of the anally emitting body in discourse and analyzes that gendering through a revisionist reading of Freud. In this feminist reading, Freud’s own insights about fantasies of anal creation and the foundational role they play in the making of the creative subject are used to challenge foundational tenets of psychoanalytically informed theories of the formation of gender, and to highlight the ways in which the gendering of anality works in unexpected ways to keep women, at an unconscious level, from the backdoor of authorship and authority, from the origins of science and of art.