How might a Sāmoan diasporic lens broaden our understanding of queer worlds?

Queer worlds are often theorized using Western frameworks of knowledge systems and power. In this book, queer author and researcher Seutaʻafili Patrick Thomsen brings diversity to the discourse, by exploring the stories of Korean gay men in and between Seoul in Korea and Seattle in the US. Drawn from lived experience and the author’s use of talanoa (Pacific research methodology), the book centres transnational, migrant and racialized realities – so contributing to the complication of West-centric ideas of gayness and coming out.

Looking at the intersections of race, globalization, diaspora, religion and queer identity, these stories add richness and complexity to the field of Queer and LGBT+ Studies.

1: Beginnings
2: Sleepless in Seattle: The complex and complicated coming-out process
3: Doing the transnational time warp: Constructing difference between Korean America and contemporary South Korea
4: Global Korean gaze: Influences from the “West” and the emergence of a Korean gay consciousness in Seoul
5: Negotiating queer/ gay futurity in Seoul
6: Seattle so gay white: Unpacking the experiences of racism among Korean gay men
7: Insidious collusion: Exploring the transnational nature of gay racism
8: Conclusion: Thoughts and reflections from a Samoan queer researcher
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Seutaʻafili Patrick Thomsen PhD (he/they) is a Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Patrick is a proud faʻafafine and queer Sāmoan scholar, educator, and researcher, having received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle. As an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary scholar, his research interests straddle the lines between queer and LGBT+ Studies, intersectionality, critical race theory, Pacific knowledges, transnationalism, and Korean studies.