This article aims to contribute to conceptual discussions about how postcolonial queer subjects negotiate the borders between putatively “local” queer subject formations and increasingly global sexual categories. It reexamines the tension-ridden nexus between “gay” and the Filipino bakla, arguing that the complex encounters between such formations are conditioned by emplaced class and gender hierarchies that stem from both colonial history and a neoliberal cultural context. I argue that in contrast to Filipino gay men in the diaspora who recuperate the practices of the bakla to negotiate displacement, middle- and upper-class gay men in the homeland (specifically Manila) offer an inverted picture of global-local relations, since the absence of a shared diasporic experience of displacement, (racialized) exclusion, and downward mobility also operates as the absence of any impetus to recover kabaklaan (bakla-ness) from its subordinated position within local exclusionary systems. Drawing from popular themes that thread through the virtual, physical, and print spaces that have emerged as part of Manila's post-2000 gay scene, the article foregrounds notions of complicity, particularly in terms of how the “newness” of the gay scene is made visible through the violent rewriting of kabaklaan as a temporal anomaly. Affective understandings of global space-time, underpinned by dreams of mobility and imaginative planetary geographies, are here depicted as unstable introjected trajectories haunted by the spectral presence of kabaklaan in the “now” of gay Manila and by the need to continuously exorcise such apparitions.
This article grapples with the issues of sameness and difference in the context of the globalization of gay male identity, particularly in terms of the growing identification of upper class Filipinos with "global gayness." The figure of the global gay is investigated as a hegemonic, yet unstable, point of self-identification that enables the production of anxious subjects that are simultaneously privileged and marginalized, local and global, indigenous and cosmopolitan. I attempt to explore these contradictions by rereading the globalization of gay identity as a product of Althusserian interpellation processes, understood in terms of self-identification (subscription rather than ascription) animated by narrative pleasure and by reexamining mimicry as a never-to-be-completed task that involves the reproduction of a regime of Whiteness. I also examine how journeys to "gay" metropoles serve to rupture dreams of belonging and conclude with a preliminary exploration of how globalization carries the potential for an ethics of sexual difference grounded on indeterminacy and in-betweenness.
In 1993, the body of former Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E Marcos, was moved from Honolulu, Hawaii, where he died in exile, to a private mausoleum attached to his ancestral home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes’ Cemetery, Marcos’s body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Marcos Mausoleum prior to the controversial burial and at the protests that came in its wake, this essay examines the sense of loss and longing that has animated the rise of authoritarian nostalgia. Banished yet unburied, the dictator’s embalmed corpse, I suggest, speaks to what remains unmourned under democracy and which thus always threatens to return—namely, a figure of unfettered freedom and authority, whose power might be said to extend over life, death, and time itself. I argue that it is this figure—the figure of a sovereign gone missing—that authoritarian nostalgia takes as its object and which grows more seductive in light of the hollowing out of popular sovereignty that has come to define the post-revolutionary experience.
No abstract
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