Dissertation Title
Exotic Bodies, Occupied Territories: Performing Settler Security in (Queer) Nightlife and Erotic Entertainment at the Edge of Empire
Chair: Kara Jhalak Miller
(Proposal Defended: May 2021)
Dissertation Abstract: Exotic Bodies, Occupied Territories is auto-ethnographic performance-as-research examining my experience as a queer dancer and nightlife entertainer, and how the aesthetics of erotic performance work to eroticize settler-sexuality (TallBear) and queer homonationalism (Puar). I expand the term “settler-sexuality” to define “settler-erotics” and its aesthetics through the lens of erotic entertainment industries. The ethical dimension in my dissertation research explores their relationship to sites of Indigenous land dispossession and nuclear bomb testing done by the U.S. military near these sites. Erotic entertainment as leisure industry circulates gendered and racialized representations of bodies that eroticize concepts of labor and property integral to settler societies and invisibilizes settlers’ proximity to threats from the impacts of military activity, such as harm caused by the Red Hill Water Crisis. I bring recognition to the artists who subversively perform gender and sexuality in these Honolulu industries, and the ways their work disrupts the “settler-erotics” and enacts the potential of performance as resistance.