Gilbert Caluya

Gilbert Caluya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding (the MnM Centre) at the University of South Australia. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2009 in Gender and Cultural Studies. He is a recipient of the University of Sydney Medal, the Australian Postgraduate Award, the Sydney University College of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Award and the Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives Thesis Prize.

The guiding impetus behind my research is to trace how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape contemporary cultural formations in a globalised world by exposing the ways race thinking is invested in our embodied subjectivities and the affective, semiotic and material environments in which we live. Theoretically, my work is influenced by postcolonialism and critical race theory, poststructuralism, queer theory, corporeal feminism and phenomenology (particularly Lingis and Levinas).

To date I have explored these questions in two main cultural sites: Asian diasporic intimacies and everyday cultures of security. The first line of research is based on autoethnographic, media and archival research to explore the ways that Orientalism impinges upon the formation of sexual subjectivities in the West. It takes seriously the question of what it means to ‘face racism’ in order to interrogate the affective and semiotic dynamics of anti-Asian racism in queer culture. The second thread of research continues from my PhD thesis ‘Terror’s Territories: Race, Politics and Everyday Space’ and traces the emergences of everyday security practices in the post-Cold War period as a genealogy of contemporary cultures of fear. It shows how the emergence of ‘security consciousness’ coincides with the shifting racial demographies of Western urban environments.