Takeo Rivera

Takeo Rivera is an assistant professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is a specialist in performance studies with a focus on race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. American cultural production. His current project, Model Minority Masochism, is focused on masochism and techno-orientalism in Asian American cultural production across multiple media, including theater, literature, graphic novels, historical archives, and video games. This project explores the relationship between power and pleasure within the traumas of racialization, examining affective attachments to nonhuman, machine-like stereotypical forms.

Dr. Rivera is also a playwright whose plays have been staged in New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His creative work explores race, masculinity, and sexuality at length. His play Goliath has been recognized by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest, and the Planet Connections Theater Festivity.

Dr. Rivera teaches courses in contemporary drama, modern drama, art and gender, Asian American literature, new media, and the literature and performance of people of color in the United States.

Selected Publications:

• “Ordering a New World: Orientalist Biopower in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.”Routledge Companion to Asian American Media. ed. Lori Lopez & Vincent Pham. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• “Do Asians Dream of Electric Shrieks?: Techno-Orientalism and Erotohistoriographic Masochism in Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution.” Amerasia Journal 40-2. 2014, pp. 67-86.
• “You Have to Be What You’re Talking About: Youth Poets, Amateur Counter-Conduct, and Parrhesiastic Value in the Amateur Youth Poetry Slam.” Performance Research. 18-3. June 2013, pp. 112-121.
• Co-authored with Korina Jocson: “Toward a Theory of Poemness: Cultural Politics and Transformative Pedagogies.” Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education. Zeus Leonardo, ed. Boston: Sense Publishers, July 2010.

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