Gay empire

Todd A. This paper explores how pre-WWII histories of Japanese imperialism and militarism inflected the imagination and practice of gay desire in Asia-Pacific after The first discourse that problematizes this Cold War epistemology is evidenced by many authors who homoeroticized the drudgery and violence of prewar soldiering in a demilitarized Japan.

The second part of the presentation interrogates contemporaneous accounts that encouraged Japanese men to return to the many urban centers of its former empire — not as war mongering soldiers or colonial officials, but as middle-class businessmen engaged in sex tourism.

The Gays who Built and Broke the Roman Empire

Building on feminist critiques of heterosexual liaisons in the ongoing subordination of lower-class women, I show how inter-ethnic encounters between gay men developed in tandem with kisaneg tourism, a post-colonial form of sex work that re-established an unequal system of transactions facilitating the Japanese consumption of Korean bodies.

Organizer: Korean Studies, Dept. Asian Dynamics Initiative. Time: 19 Mar.