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Book Manuscript in ProcessDr. Wood's book Queering the Apocalypse: Survival Politics, Zombies, and Popular Culture examines how apocalyptic settings and themes in transnational zombie films, graphic novels, television shows, and video games conceive of futurity and survival in queer terms. I analyze how visions of zombie apocalypse manifest in these pop culture narratives, while exploring their attendant survival politics, which often require rejecting normative behaviors, codes, and ideologies in order to survive. I also focus specifically on how apocalyptic zombie narratives explore transnational fears about sexual and reproductive agency, racialized and gendered Others, disease pandemic, and scientific and technological advancements against the backdrop of decomposing social, national, and global landscapes. On a broader theoretical level, this project interrogates how "queerness" and temporality play a critical role in imagining the apocalypse as well as conceptualizing survival in zombie narratives when neither a utopian future nor a nostalgic return to the past is viable.
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"Barebacking Werewolves in Rural America: Queer Erotic and Ecological Fantasies in M/M Paranormal Romance Fiction"This article in process builds upon a conference paper Dr. Wood gave at the OGOM conference at the University of Hertfordshire.
With the rise of paranormal romance fiction in the last decade, the werewolf has been rehabilitated from gruesome monster to romantic hero. Although many scholars have begun examining representations of werewolves in heterosexual paranormal romances, LBGT competitors are often ignored or remain invisible despite the fact that they proliferate and sell in considerable numbers on the e-book market. This article aims to address this gap in the discourse and examine the erotic fantasy frameworks around the figure of the werewolf in m/m (gay) paranormal romance fiction. Via the werewolf’s close and necessary connection to nature for survival, these narratives imagine queer existence and romance in rural America—something that tends to remain invisible in metrocentrist representations of LGBT community in mainstream culture. At the same time, werewolves in m/m romances are typically depicted as impervious to human illnesses and diseases--most importantly, sexually transmitted ones. In this fantasy framework, barebacking becomes both a utopian erotic fantasy of barrier-free gay sex free from risk and an idealized pinnacle of intimacy among men. |
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“Mapping Commercial and Cultural Flows: Overlap and Intersection in Japanese Boys’ Love and Western M/M Romance Fiction”
This article in process expands on an invited lecture Dr. Wood gave at a Queer Manga symposium at the University of British Columbia.
Although still somewhat on the fringes of Western commercial publishing, LGBT romance is gaining greater traction and cross-over readership in mainstream (read heterosexual) romance markets. In particular, M/M (gay) romance has blossomed as a strong e-book industry in the last few years. M/M romance as a commercial genre of original fiction grew out of slash fanfiction, with a prominent (although by no means exclusive) number of authors and readers identifying as cisgender women. While many scholars have already examined critical similarities between fan cultures and texts that fall under the umbrellas of Western slash fiction and Japanese yaoi, there has as yet been minimal comparative analysis of the commercial offshoots of these two genres—M/M romance fiction and Japanese Boys’ Love manga and novels, respectively. This article analyzes some of the commercial flows, overlaps, and intersections between these two genres, which reflect the not unconflicted shift of amateur fan-produced queer subgenres of texts to commercially published and marketed ones. |
