The Haunting of Gay Manila

Abstract

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.

Gay hospitality as desiring labor: Contextualizing transnational sexual labor

“…Gay travel is one prominent global flow; sexual labor comes into focus only in its contact with the global gay, which renders same-sex desiring men, and their lived experiences, desire, and labor, obsolete outside of this global encounter. Altman's model offers little to a contextually grounded perspective of transnational sexualities where the inaccessibility of the 'global gay' (Benedicto, 2008) is more often unpredictably grappled with.…”

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

“…In tracing the continuities (and discontinuities) between Imelda and kabaklaan ( bakla ‐ness), my aim in this essay is not to establish clear‐cut points of conceptual homogeny or difference. Rather, I hope to further illuminate the gendered logic of urban modernization in the postcolony and, more critically, show how a logic of queer transformation buttresses the fantasy of a modernity to come, even as queer formations tied to the bakla emerge as part of the degraded lifeways produced by impoverishment and are rendered spectral by contemporary, classed notions of “gay modernity” that cast “trans” subjectivity as anterior (Benedicto ). In this way, this essay complicates understandings of queerness during Marcos rule and its aftermath as either conscripted into or set against the dictatorship's vision of development; it foregrounds the ambivalent relations of attachment and detachment that simultaneously bind and exclude gender and sexual non‐normativity to the trajectories laid bare by the dream of becoming modern.…”

Queer Worldings: The Messy Art of Being Global in Manila and New York

“… See the works of Benedicto (), Garcia () and Johnson () for a rich and expansive analysis of the Filipino gay/transgender/bakla subjects and globality. My fieldwork in both New York and Manila suggests that perceptions and aspirations toward a gay globality are oftentimes marked by class privilege.…”