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RESEARCH

SPECIALIZATIONS

  • Asian American Cultural Studies

  • Queer Performance

  • Music Studies

  • Nightlife Studies

My research is concerned with intra-Asian desire in queer nightlife, which has often been derogatorily called "sticky rice" by white gay men who are rejected by queer East and Southeast Asian North Americans who self-idenitfy as gaysians. I examine how "sticky" relationships between gaysians and queer Asians from Asia reveal about race, sexuality, and Asian North American identity when whiteness is not the primary point of reference for desire.

CURRENT PROJECTS

  • "Gaysia as Method: Queer Southeast Asian/North American Circuits of Play

    • My doctoral degree is invested in thinking with and through queer Asian North American nightlife as a microcosm for the Asian North American condition, as well as what nightlife can potentially teach us about the diasporic experience.​

PREVIOUS PROJECTS

  • An epistemology from the closet : a queer archival practice and history of gendered performance in Singapore’s Officer Cadet School

    • For my Masters degree thesis, I investigated the Singaporean Officer Cadet School (OCS) singlet as a queer archival object and how queer people took something symbolic of nationalistic "straight" masculinity and turned it into an affective object of queer fetish.
       

  • Mui Tsai (妹仔) and Transpacific Child Labour Trafficking 

    • As part of instructional materials for transpacific Asian Studies, I researched and created a teaching module centered around mui tsai and the circulation of Chinese child labor.​
       

  • ​From Chinese Men to Chinese “Boys” : Unearthing Masculinities and Intimate Labour in Colonial Singapore

    • For my Bachelors degree thesis, I looked at histories of gay sex work in Singapore and tried to piece together how gay Asian sex work purchased by white colonial elite led to the creation of Section 377A, or the anti-gay sex law in Singapore which lasted until 2022 (a few months after the completion of my thesis).

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amquach@usc.edu

I acknowledge that the University of Southern California (USC) where I study and work is situated on the traditional, ancestral and stolen territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva Peoples of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands of San Nicolas, San Clemente, Santa Barbara and Santa Catalina). I also recognize the Chumash, Tataviam, Taaqtam, ʔívil̃uqaletem, and Acjachemen people for the land that USC occupies around Southern California.

©2026 by Aydin Quach

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