Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture

Benedicto, Bobby

doi:10.1215/01642472-2348977

Cited by 18 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The ubiquity of the bakla in fact makes its invisibility in upmarket, gay-identified spaces especially notable. 12 For an extended version of this ethnographic account of the Amazing Show, see Benedicto (2013); for an alternative reading, see Peterson (2011). 13 This is not to say that bakla performances cannot, in any circumstance, be humorous and ironic.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

Benedicto

2014

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This paper examines how queer practices of transformation enable the preservation and perversion of the logics, aspirations, and violences that animated Imelda Marcos's "war of urban beautification". It traces conceptual overlaps between the notions of truth and beauty that underpinned Imelda's faith in architectural modernism and which operate in the sex/gender tradition of kabaklaan. Using the case study of the Manila Film Center, a formerly abandoned and famously haunted Marcos-era building that has been transformed into the host site of a "transgender" revue, the paper demonstrates how queerness, necropower, architecture, and dreams of urban and global modernity come together through the spatial effects of authoritarian power.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… For an extended version of this ethnographic account of the Amazing Show, see Benedicto (); for an alternative reading, see Peterson ().…”

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confidence: 99%

The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

Benedicto

2014

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“…This lost sovereignty is represented, most forcefully, in and as the dictator’s capacity to create, to transform the national landscape. Indeed, if the authoritarian past proves seductive, it is because the time of dictatorship has long been imagined as a time of creation : a period when the nation was being re-forged into a showcase of “development” through the construction of new roads, highways, and bridges; satellite systems and communications towers; airports, dams, and power plants; housing complexes; medical and technological centers; and, not least, spectacular Brutalist cultural buildings that were erected at breakneck speeds and on land reclaimed from the sea ( Benedicto, 2013 ). Like all infrastructures, those of the Marcos years signal aspirations and serve as vehicles whereby collective fantasies about advancement through the linear time of progress are made “emotionally real” ( Larkin, 2013 : 333).…”

Section: Sites Of Ruin Acts Of Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1 My fieldwork in 2014 was conducted as part of an investigation of what, at the time, I saw as nascent feelings of Marcos nostalgia that could be illuminated through a reading of the spectral environments of Marcos-era architectural and infrastructural projects (Benedicto, 2013 ). As this article details, those feelings would become, over the course of a few years, a markedly public feeling.…”

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confidence: 99%

The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship: Nostalgia, sovereignty, and the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos

Benedicto

2021

Environ Plan D

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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.

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“…Queering, therefore, is an anti-normative stance and seeks to question the core assumptions that sustain the homogenizing reflexes of the state and its apparatuses (Berlant and Warner, 1995, 1998; Warner, 1993). Consequently, queer spaces are those that disrupt established patterns of existence that rely on exclusivity for sustenance, as well as spaces that enable such disruptive agencies (Anderson, 2015; Benedicto, 2013; Konrad, 2014; Marshall, 2015; Rushbrook, 2016; Stella, 2013). As Halberstam notes, queer constructions of space “develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (2005: 1).…”

Section: Contesting Moral Geographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi

Erol

2017

Sexualities

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During the summer of 2013, Turkey witnessed the largest protest movement in the history of the republic. The protests began with environmentalist concerns to save a public park in central Istanbul, Gezi Park, from becoming a shopping mall. However, in a matter of days, the protests turned into a reaction against what many protestors perceived to be the authoritarian rule of the prime minister at the time. While the mainstream protest discourses focused on reacting against such perceptions, which produced sexist and heterosexist discourses, queer discourses were centered on celebrating coexistence and diversity through resistance. Drawing on literatures of queer theory that focus on queer space and moral geography, this article builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space. Using queer linguistics to investigate blog posts that were written at the time of the protest by queer individuals who were taking part in protest, this article investigates the ways in which queer discourses construct the moral geography of the Gezi Park and at the same time challenge neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies.

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Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture

Cited by 18 publications

References 3 publications

The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship: Nostalgia, sovereignty, and the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos

Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi

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