A NEGLECTED QUEER PLAY HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT-Soon-Tek Oh's Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970).
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Soon-Tek Oh’s 1970 play, Tondemonai—Never Happen! (here-inafter Tondemonai), is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. A pro- ductionof East West Players, it was the first commercially-produced play todramatize Japanese American incarceration; and yet, despite also featuringqueer kinship, it remains archived and practically forgot- ten in the academy.Its performance at a discursive center of Asian American cultural productiondisrupts a homogenized narrative in Asian American cultural studies—that theera was beset with queerphobic cultural nationalism. The play presents anopportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalismtargeting both racial castra- tion and proto-homonationalism. After analyzingthe play, I proffer a framework regarding homonationalism’s long emergencein transpa- cific terms, and reinterpret Lonny Kaneko’s classic 1976 shortstory “The Shoyu Kid” as another example of Asian American queer culturalnationalist storytelling. This article features archival stage photography ofTondemonai, which gives an impression of Asian American cultural productionof the era as queerer than often presumed.
Author: Alan Williams
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7082276399
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