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

Abstract

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.

With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality

“…Jupp, 2012; Laframbois, 2015; Price, 2015). In addition to these studies, queer urban research on the co-optive ‘worlding’ of queerness and its enrollment into projects of neoliberal urbanization and interurban competition (see Benedicto, 2015; Oswin, 2015 and the Antipode special issue on ‘World, City, Queer’) offer praxis-oriented, empirically grounded accounts that blur the neat conceptual binaries separating ‘induced’ and ‘expressed’ forms of difference, and as such raise productive questions about the hetero-masculinist contours of the minimal/maximal poles in Lefebvre’s differential matrix.…”