PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP AND "TEMPORAL HYBRIDITY"
IN A QUEER DIASPORA

By locating art practice within social forces that operate across temporal ambivalence... the concept of authenticity is again disrupted. Time is, literally, hybridized: reconfigured so that past, present, and future are experienced not as linear, but as simultaneously occurring within the same moment, as in a point or in a continually self-reflexive, expanding and contracting-pulsing circle.-Allan DeSouza

The deviant postcolonial, the coloured queer, the "tomboy" dyke, the bakla (a term that designates a "third sex") . . . all of these subjects make up the artist-creators of alternative sexual practices and worldviews who survive by living consciously in this temporal hybridity to which DeSouza refers. These identities result in hybrid subjectivities that articulate the interstices of race, gender, sexuality, nationhood, and class, as well as the histories that are implicated by their postcolonial condition. Yet it is precisely at this intersection that a politics of coalition encounters obstacles; the multiplicity of hybrid identities becomes invisible to members of isolated communities who uphold a monolithic view of identity, and thus deny differences within community.

In this article, I explore the Filipino queer diaspora and the performance of transnational citizenship. I appropriate traditional definitions of diaspora as a concept that describes global communities that have been dispersed from their country of origin to other parts of the world due to migration. By placing diaspora within a queer context, I intend to explore the differences between concepts of gender and sexuality as they are experienced by queer subjects in various global locations. By transnationalism, I mean the practice of activism and performance that allows these queer communities to cross borders in both a concrete and imagined sense. Queer racialized subjects perform multiple forms of citizenship that are falsely perceived to simultaneously contradict each other. They reflect a necessary, subversive hybridity in an era of neocolonialism and globalisation in that they simultaneously challenge heteronormativity and the process of racial assimilation. In the emergence of queer diasporas world wide, the reproduction of hierarchies causes internal displacement of its own subjects. One such displacement occurs for lesbian subjects who disrupt the notion of a queer diaspora due to gender differences in relation to their queer male counterparts. I will explore these issues in my analysis of arguments by scholars writing on the gay postcolonial diasporic experience. In this analysis, I will depart from DeSouza's argument by illustrating the politics of queer difference between men and women in which lesbian subjects exist as social forces that occur within a different moment of self-reflexivity. In my exploration of performance and activism as well as identity/community formation in the U.S. and in the Philippines, I intend to reveal the way in which identities informed by race, sex, deviance, and resistance to colonial rule, remain in motion as bodies spread across time, though at different moments of self-reflexivity.

Power Plays

In order to see the continuum of Filipino cultural production as resistance to hegemonic rule, it is useful to provide an account of performance practices throughout the century as analysed by cultural studies and theatre practitioners. It is particularly important to point out the performances that occurred around the time of U.S. conquest of the Philippines shortly after it gained independence from Spain. Vicente Rafael has written about the differences between the American colonial administrators' representation of the Filipino nation at the turn of the century and the representations in the seditious melodramas of Filipino nationalists resisting imperial intervention.

Contrary to the census records, which rendered the natives visible for surveillance and discipline, nationalist dramas portrayed the natives as subjects in control of their own histories. Rafael refers to the practices of colonial rule as "Benevolent Bondage" in which assimilation provided the natives the opportunity to work under the auspices of the colonial masters. One might recognize similarities in Rafael's commentary with Frantz Fanon's sense of colonisation as a sexual moment in which an implied homosexual violence occurs between white patriarchal rule and the feminised, racialised "Little Brown Brothers. [1]" The masculinist basis of colonial patriarchy is evident in the census reports which classified the colonised subjects by conflating gender with sex as a representation of naturalised sexual difference (Rafael, 211). In his analysis, Rafael argues that these plays were augmented by a shifting and provisional status of gender. The complex role of women and men, in particular, the absent or marginal role of the father, reflects the condition of a nation in which patriarchy had not yet been stabilised. Rafael does not mean to suggest that there was gender equality, but that gender inequality was questioned. He suggests that nationalist dramas offered alternative sites for knowledge and power in which social desires were set in motion (Rafael, 214).

With regard to the evolution of performance practices from these early nationalist dramas, Catherine Diamond has researched the role of 20th century performance in the Philippines as a means to articulate cultural identity during times of ongoing political turmoil. She comments on the various genres of performance that took place at the beginning of the century, during the American colonial period, and pre and post martial law. She argues that the development of a national identity was hybrid in that it reflected a combination of Filipino, American, and Spanish forms. I would argue that this hybridisation, in terms of the evolution of content and form within performance is evident in contemporary performance practice. For instance, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, performances by Filipino Americans address issues of authenticity, cultural identity, gender and sexuality. In a performance piece entitled Archipelaga by the women of Filipino Alliance, which began in 1995 and takes place at Legends of the S.E.A. (the South East Asian Culture show that occurs during Asian American History Month), issues of gender, authenticity, religion, sexuality, and Orientalism, to name only a few, have been the focus of articulations of Filipina-American identity. The following are some passages from the 1997 performance which touch on these concerns:

Difference. Diversity. Unity in a space disjointed. Scatter./ Yeah, I'm an 'Oriental'. Was he surprised that I had a name that he could pronounce?/ I've searched for home. Went over to the mutha' land with romantic notions of finding all that I had lost when my parents migrated. Only to be told that I didn't belong. I was American not Filipino./ Today I bring my first love into my first home. And worlds of different colour collide./ You may think I'm a confused dyke, but I won't let you hurt me. I say no to the rejections you justify on the basis of racial solidarity./ I am angry at a past erotic desire conquered by whiteness./ Dammit. I can't believe I have to be in a fucking pageant. Why should I subject myself to painful, sexist, humiliating - pointless! - pageantry just to please my whole family?/ So instead you walk on by like nothing ever phases you -- like you just came out of the Clark Air Base brothel -- where more of our sistas get their pussies violated and their voices stolen./ I say I wanna get that fucking Amerikan GI that's fucking my sista. Say I want to cut his titi off and fry it with the dogs.

These passages reveal the way in which fragmentation informs the articulation of Filipina-American hybrid identities. For instance, one woman expresses her search for home in the Philippines, only to experience being told that she was American, not Filipina; another woman writing about sexuality, directly responds to members of her ethnic community who justify sexism and homophobia on the basis of racial solidarity. In Archipelaga, feminism, as it emerged in Western academic discourse, reveals itself as something that is threatening to racial solidarity, which causes identity fragmentation; however, it is this fragmentation that allows for different articulations of community and feminism to occur as hybrid and/or transnational spaces for activism.

When the piece was performed, there were accusations concerning its lack of "authenticity" which I interpret to be consistent with ethno-nationalist arguments informed by patriarchal worldviews that demonise feminism as something that is assimilationist and divorced from tradition. These accusations rest on essentialist notions of Filipino identity that do not account for gender or for transnational subjects. Furthermore, limited views of "authenticity" deny mutual desires at work where some Filipinos in the Philippines desire American cultural forms as a parallel to the way in which Filipino-Americans in the U.S. desire more "authentic" Filipino cultural forms.

I would like to use the example of amateur singing contests and beauty contests in the Bicol region of the Philippines to illustrate this point. Fennella Cannell has interpreted these contests to be moments in which participants imitate Western standards of beauty for the purpose of self-transformation. In these performances what appears to be more distant and powerful, is brought nearer through such a transformation. It is significant to comment on the beauty contests in Cannell's study because they reveal the construction of gender in relation to nationhood, privilege, and authenticity. It would be inaccurate to apply the term "gay" to the participants in these contests since many of them refer to themselves as bakla - neither man nor woman, but "a man who possesses a woman's heart" (Cannell, 241). Despite the ways in which the bakla can attain a stardom which is inaccessible to poor women in Bicol, Cannell argues that they continue to live on the edges of shame and humiliation in the sense that their participation in beauty contests reveals the parallel impossibilities of changing sex and becoming American (251). While Cannell attempts to emphasize the different meaning of mimicry in this context, her conclusions border on denying non-Western agency in the reinvention of cultural forms; this sort of denial risks creating culturally imperialist views of non-Western practices which may carry their own significance and resistance within the local spaces in which they exist. Nonetheless, she brings up an interesting point about the way in which authenticity is simultaneously constructed around concepts of gender and nationhood.

In contrast to the feminist informed Archipelaga performance, the construction of traditional femininity in the Bicol beauty pageants allows for privilege for the bakla, whereas among the Filipina-American women, beauty pageants are viewed as oppressive traditions that bind them to specific models of femininity. These differences seem to suggest that gender and privilege function differently depending on diasporic location. For instance, whereas attaining traditional models of femininity parallels American ideals for the bakla, participating in a tradition that is based on culture - such as beauty pageants in the U.S. - is perceived as an obstacle to deconstructing these traditional models of femininity for young Filipina-American women. Consequently, these models are associated with privilege or lack of privilege and diasporic location.

The analysis of these performances also suggests that authenticity acquires different meanings in the Philippines and in the U.S., despite the creation of an imagined community from both locations. Furthermore, the mutual desire at work throughout the diaspora renders the notion of authenticity to be relative to location. American-Filipinos and Filipino-Americans are implicated by the histories of both the Philippines and the U.S. due to colonialism; however, these hybrid performance practices reveal their location in temporal hybridity as well as the transformation of performance in response to history and contemporary struggle. With close to 50 years of U.S. colonisation, Americanisation in the Philippines has created hybrid cultures in similar ways that Filipino-Americans continue to create hybrid cultures in the U.S. To account for this hybridity in its various manifestations throughout the diaspora, I wish to invoke Lisa Lowe's understanding of hybridity based on materialist conditions that are consequences of colonialism and neocolonialism. Jose Munoz' understanding of hybridity as the impossibility of identity shaped by the web of power relations between the First and Third World is also critical [2]. The bakla who performs with a certain amount of shame because he/she knows that it is just as impossible to change sex as it is to become American reveals an impossible identity, while one of the women performing in Archipelaga writes about the impossibility of being Filipino in the Philippines; hence, what seems to be at work is a process whereby First World privilege denies access to identity for those wishing to cross borders, in both a geographic and imaginative sense. In the next section, I will engage with issues of hybridity and authenticity in relation to Filipino queer identities, specifically, Filipino gay men in New York City. The inclusion of immigrants in this account provides possibilities for approaching hybridity based on the material experiences of transmigration as well as hybridity in relation to queerness and the various modes of performance required for survival.

Dangers in Authenticating Filipino Queerness

In this section I will primarily engage with Martin Manalansan's dissertation entitled "Remapping Frontiers: The Lives of Filipino Gay Men in New York" in which he attempts to use Filipino gay male border-crossing as a challenge to current trends in idealizing the globalisation of a monolithic gay culture. From my reading, Manalansan attempts to identify Filipino gay male culture in contrast to a homogenous and exclusive American gay culture; however, gender difference and worldviews among some of his subjects reveal a totalising construction of Filipino queerness which at times borders on misogyny, and thus displaces the lesbian within this discourse. I will depart from Manalansan's analysis in an attempt to reveal the lesbian postcolonial, diasporic condition. In his dissertation, Manalansan distinguishes between gay and bakla, where the latter is a concept transported from the Philippines that designates a tradition based on a performative feminine self whereas the term "gay" is associated with Western sexual practices. Many Filipino immigrants also identify as "gay" which reveals the ways in which colonial and postcolonial ties have resulted in hybrid practices and beliefs based on gay and bakla (7-12). One factor that distinguishes bakla from gay is the emphasis placed on gender performance rather than on sex acts. In Asia and Latin America, homosexual identity is primarily defined by gender performance, which often determines one's role in the sex act (46-47) [3]. Extending the use of "performance" as it is utilised by feminist and queer theorists who primarily write about theatre or cross-dressing, Manalansan's use of "positioned performance" encompasses social behaviour as a set of creative responses to situations which take into account cultural idioms that go beyond the stage. "Positioned performance" is inspired by feminist works on the politics of location: "Positioned performance is therefore situated in what Rosaldo (1989) and Anzaldua (1987) call the borderlands which are busy intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, and ethnicity and not always geographic sites. Borderlands... are important locations where negotiations and engagements for the creation and struggle for symbolic and biological survival are continually 'staged'" (Manalansan, 21).

Using the example of New York gay spaces, Manalansan distinguishes various forms of the "drama of the body", constructed differently according to race. He observes that spaces are often inflected by race and class such as the beauty contests put on by Filipino gay men. Manalansan has written extensively about one particular event, the Santacruzan of Manhattan, as an example of a ritual in which collective identities of Filipino gay transmigrants contest and reconfigure hegemonic ideas and practices, such as those that are based on Orientalism or on the 'ethnocentric conceit' which Jose Munoz describes as the "the tendency in erotic representation to figure non-white men as exotic kink. [4]"

These celebratory beauty contests contrast with the darker side of the Filipino immigrant gay male experience, particularly, in their encounter with the AIDS pandemic (236). Manalansan argues that the hybrid conditions under which immigrants live become central in their process of identification with AIDS (234). AIDS reveals the "in-between-ness of spatial, emotional, and cultural displacements between the homeland and the new land (Manalansan, 239)." It would appear that since AIDS is a terminal disease, the transitional state of life to death parallels the transitional experience of living between two cultures and locations. AIDS is, for Manalansan, the best allegory for the gay postcolonial experience, in that it is a transnational occurrence that traverses geographic and sexual borders.

I would now like to turn to literature about the effects of AIDS on the construction of gender and sexual practices in the Philippines. Michael Tan has written about the ways in which the spread of AIDS has led to opportunities to study MSM's (men who have sex with men) in the Philippines. Tan observes that AIDS research has revealed that there is a large number of MSM's who are defined by and made up of various subcultures [5]. Until recently, all of the HIV-infected Filipinos who had gone public were female sex workers (Tan, 223). Tan has also remarked that many sex workers and bakla view AIDS as a women's disease, and often prefer not to sleep with men who have sex with women for this reason. Others are apprehensive about having sex with higher class men who are assumed to have sex with Americans and other foreigners who might carry the virus, hence, the intersection of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny in AIDS rhetoric [6]. I attribute the origin of these concepts to the role of machismo in constructing gender roles that lead certain "top" gay men to assume that they are immune from AIDS. Ironically, the feminisation of AIDS in which "bottom" gay men or bakla or heterosexual female sex workers are stigmatised, also renders lesbians invisible in AIDS discourse since lesbian sex practices do not involve a physical phallus, and are desexualised by those who perpetuate limited views of sex.

Manalansan's and Tan's research on AIDS and its effects on the lives of Filipino gay men in New York and in the Philippines are useful paradigms for examining AIDS in a transnational context. Yet, both authors write about the gay male experience without attempting to make themselves accountable for gender dynamics within this discourse. One might think that by implicating Filipina lesbian and bisexual women in their analysis, they could engage more with the effects of venereal disease on female sex workers in the Philippines. While Manalansan argues that AIDS is the best allegory for the gay postcolonial experience, it is obvious that this allegory may not extend to the lesbian postcolonial experience. The Filipina lesbian's role in the transnational politics of AIDS activism can connect her to heterosexual women in Asia who suffer from the disease. At this point, I would like to provide an example that testifies to the possibilities of a queer transnational politics of AIDS that engages men and women in the queer Filipino diaspora.

In 1997, The Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS established Persimmon Space, the first New York City based Asian and Pacific Islander HIV women's project to serve API women who have sex with women. The project's objectives included educating queer API women about prevention through outreach and improving the health and well-being of queer API women. The establishment of this project suggests that there is a transnational and local queer women's pan-Asian consciousness at work as well as identifications among women of colour with respect to health issues. Queer API women's strategies for prevention can be seen as a response to the ways in which their communities have been affected, particularly API gay men, other women of colour in the U.S., and API female sex workers in Asia. These strategies are part of a larger project of collective decolonisation of sexuality by queers of colour. This includes accessing new territories for pleasure to which we have been denied as well as educating ourselves about our own health concerns. Communities of queer coloured women are particularly vulnerable due to the way in which they are often classified as "low risk" groups as a result of conventional, societal constructions of sex that are phallocentric in nature. In the next section, I will further explore the location of the queer Filipina in the broader discourse of Filipino gay postcoloniality and transnational coalition work.

Across That Ocean Is....

The presence of lesbians in Manalansan's and Tan's research on AIDS and Filipino gay postcolonial life occurs minimally or in a derogatory context. For instance, both make a similar point about the baklas own perceptions of sexual practices amongst themselves, which are seen as lesbianism since heterosexual desire for "real" men is what they consider natural [7]. While this discourse may provide a framework within which to analyse the experiences of transmigrant Filipino gay men, the absence of the Filipina lesbian or the brief derogatory mentions she receives prove that queer Filipino(a) diaspora acquires vastly different meanings for men and women. Furthermore, while Manalansan's work appears to be an attempt at authenticating a Filipino gay male experience in New York as a response to gay white male hegemony, Tan's work about gay men in the Philippines seems to suggest there is an increasing gravitation towards Western gay terms and practices.

Working from this premise, I would argue that there is a Filipino/American gay male mutual desire to be like the Other. While bakla identities are maintained in the U.S. as a strategy for resisting monolithic gay white culture, more men in the Philippines are identifying as gay, and by doing so are disrupting rigid gender ideologies. What role does the lesbian play in this process? Given that machismo and rigid gender ideologies in general, oppress both women and men who transgress gender boundaries, it would be logical to draw parallels between the experiences of "Oriental" gay men and straight women. Sexual commodification affects the feminised Asian male body as it does Asian women. Hence, Orientalist gender ideologies can potentially create barriers between queer Asian women and men, where the latter find more in common with heterosexual Asian women. Keeping in mind the potential for transnational consciousness and Asian women's solidarity, all three are implicated by the same system.

As Tan points out, it is dangerous to transport Western terms onto sexual practices and identities in the Philippines. In one mention of the lesbian in Manalansan's work, he writes that the term for lesbian in swardspeak and in the Philippines is "tomboy." This infantilisation of the lesbian testifies to the power asymmetries between queer men and women, which are heightened in a rigid gendered society that allows men to renounce their privilege and take on the tragic and comedic spectacle of the bakla. One might be tempted to criticize the practices of the bakla that seem to simultaneously rest on a co-optation of yet hatred for femininity. This contradiction is apparent in Manalansan's methodology for his study on the bakla as evidenced by his use of "positioned performance" which is informed by the feminist politics of location. To what extent does the queer pinay (Filipina) butch enjoy privilege in the U.S. and in the Philippines, since "butch" or "tomboy" status deprives her of power in various diasporic settings; however, taking her hybridity into account which includes a relative amount of First World privilege as a consequence of the Filipino-American postcolonial condition, it is clear that power shifts from location to location in a diasporic context. Notwithstanding these asymmetries, the construction of the infantilised lesbian can be reappropriated for the purpose of revealing the shifting nature of queer desire and sexual practices where "top" and "bottom" are simultaneously performed and deconstructed for the purpose of subverting heteronormative ideals.

By framing the experiences of diasporic Filipino queers within these concepts of temporal hybridity, it becomes clear that queer Filipino, Filipino-American, Filipino immigrant, and Filipinos in other parts of the diaspora whose experiences are informed by a history of colonialism and its effects on gender ideologies are involved in decolonising survival strategies which simultaneously repel and attract other Filipino "postcolonial deviants" within the same diaspora; yet as I have attempted to illustrate, privilege and power displace members within a diaspora due to location and/or gender difference. In the next section, I will explore the construction of hyphenated identities in the reproduction of these hierarchies.

Hyphens

Postcolonial identities that are articulated by hyphenations reveal the contradictions of displacement and dislocation. Here, I would like to create an analogy between diasporic queers and transnationalism and diasporic artists and art practices. In writing about diaspora, art, and temporal hybridity, Allan DeSouza argues that the assumed difference between artists working in the country of origin versus artists working in the West is that the latter are informed by postmodernity where the former are informed by modernity. DeSouza adds that artists working in the West, articulate issues of identity and racism more often than artists working in the country of origin who are more likely to work through indigenousness and nativism (68-70). As an alternative to approaching these artistic practices in a reductionist manner in which postmodernity emerges from modernity, he suggests that they must be placed within historicised political forces (70). Similarly, the postcolonial condition of Filipino queers throughout the world can be seen as a performance of survival in the context of historicised political forces; however, in this case, I would say that queers in the U.S. and in the Philippines are both involved in hybridised practices such as in the creation of alternative sexual worldviews and gender identities. The nationalist dramas researched by Rafael are an example of a historical force which articulated a shifting notion of gender that has continued to shift with the perpetual forces of colonialism and neocolonialism. Contemporary Filipino-American queers are involved in a process of survival whereby they are creating another point of reference in the sphere of multiple social forces, which make up the queer postcolonial condition. For instance, Filipino-American queers and bakla in the U.S. are situated in a contradictory site, which grants them privilege and access to gay American institutions that also exclude them to varying degrees. These experiences create feelings of disidentification that can be transformed as a strategy to subvert existing power asymmetries.

I would argue that this disidentification results from the hyphenated, though sometimes problematic, relationship between Filipino and American identities which create a mutability for queerness as a destabilizing factor of gender and sexuality. Consequently, queerness informs the historical processes of (post)colonial identity formation that emerges from the sexual moment of colonization which it seeks to dismantle. For Filipino-American queers, Queerness, Filipino-ness, and American-ness interact with each other differently depending on diasporic location. Yet they function simultaneously in the process of sexual decolonisation in which struggles around race, gender, sexuality, and class are informed by the histories of colonialism that began with the rape and genocide of women from the New Worlds.

Queer postcolonial identities that are informed by a set of historical forces challenge assumptions about identity politics based on incommensurability between ethnicity and queerness. I will now turn to an anecdote, which illustrates the process whereby hybrid identities, particularly queer API activists in New York responding to racism, testify to the dangers of traditional identity politics that deny multiple identities within community. The Miss Saigon coalition was organized by queer Asian American Activists in New York City in response to racist practices committed by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the New York City Gay and Lesbian Community Center. As a fundraising tactic, these two organizations sold tickets to its members and donors for the opening night of Miss Saigon, a Broadway musical perceived by many as racist and sexist. One of the main organizers, Yoko Yoshikawa, has written about the activities that took place around this particular event. Yoshikawa describes Miss Saigon as an example of Western neoimperial representations of Asians that occur against the backdrop of violence against Asians evidenced by tourist industries where women, children, and young boys survive by prostitution (280).

API gay men and lesbians living in New York City initiated the Miss Saigon coalition and later involved other queers of colour and Asian and Pacific Islander communities. The coalition pressured the directors of Lambda and the Gay and Lesbian Community Center to cancel the fundraising event. Yoshikawa writes about their attempts at drawing analogies between racist and homophobic representations and revealing the way in which the Miss Saigon benefit perpetuated the dominant ideology of white male heterosexual power. The Community Center cancelled their fundraiser, but Lambda only offered to give them a refund. Consequently, the coalition organized a protest, which included queers of all colours and API straight allies during opening night. Throughout the months that the coalition had been organized, there was little media coverage, yet an article appeared in the Village Voice denouncing coalition for gay-bashing Lambda. Yoshikawa writes, "When lesbians and gay people of colour criticize the white gay male establishment, they are 'gay-bashing.' This implies that one must be white to be gay" (287). Despite the scarce and inaccurate media coverage, which is a reflection of the invisibility of issues pertaining to queer people of colour in the mainstream, Yoshikawa concludes that the experience provides an example of the potential for complex identities to become the foundation for a version of unity that pushes parameters of existing communities (293). The queer Filipina, and queer women of colour in general, continue to be displaced within each of their communities, yet it is in their complexity and hybridity that successful coalition politics, such as those articulated by Yoshikawa, can emerge.

Conclusion

The Asian 'American' woman and the racialized woman are materially in excess of the subject 'woman' posited by feminist discourse, or the 'proletariat' described by Marxist discourse, or the 'racial' or 'ethnic' subject projected by civil rights and ethno-nationalist movements. This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. -- Lisa Lowe

I would add that the queer Asian American and woman of colour are in excess of the gay postcolonial who is often assumed to be male as indicated by some of the examples in this article. Lowe has written that the "racialized feminization of labor" which is occurring in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism reveals the ways in which the intersection of various axes of power provide a means to link Asian immigrant and Asian American women with other immigrant and women of colour (Lowe, 158). Incorporating an understanding of the immigration experiences of queer postcolonials is crucial in the process of conceptualising a queer diaspora since it is a concrete example of border-crossing which occurs on the realm of geographic location, sexuality and gender. Throughout this paper, I have attempted to expose the excess of the queer woman of colour in alternative models of writing about queer/coloured subjectivities by exploring the possibilities and difficulties in conceptualising a Filipino queer diaspora.

Rather than attempt to arrive at any conclusions, I would rather point to the difficulties that I have encountered in this undertaking as well as offer suggestions to those who are also engaged in exploring queer diaspora. It is a productive and necessary task to explore the specificity of Filipina-American queer identities given the neocolonial relationship on which these hyphenated identities are based. These identities interact with queerness as a potential revolutionary mechanism in disrupting Orientalist ideologies that inform the economic and sexual relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. For queers of colour, an understanding of neocolonial forms of sexual exploitation, which inform economic relations, is part of the process of decolonising sexuality. As Karin Aguilar-San Juan asks, "How can we even talk about sexual desire in the Philippines, or in any Third World country that, desperate for foreign exchange, lures tourists from developed nations with the promise of beautiful and willing flesh?" If and/or when an inclusive Filipino transnational politics of queerness emerges, it must be grounded in class struggles that are currently highlighted by the "racialized feminization of labor" to which Lowe refers. Furthermore, we should remember that the roots of pan-Asian coalition building in the U.S. occurred within the context of organizing labour as suggested by some authors [8]. At this particular time, Filipina overseas contract workers or women who came to the U.S. via the mail-order-bride industry or the large numbers of sex workers who are dying of AIDS all over Asia, provide concrete examples of the sexual politics of neocolonialism in which queer and straight Asian American and other women of colour are implicated, as well as those men of colour who suffer discrimination based on their gender and sexuality. We must remain conscious in each of our communities and inform potential allies of the ways in which sexuality, race, gender, and economics inform our struggles around neocolonialism. We will then be better equipped to resist the displacement of hybrid identities that are critical players in the process of decolonisation.

As queer postcolonials, we must simultaneously organize on transnational and local levels while being conscious of the risk of reproducing hierarchies. I would like to offer an anecdote which functions in a way that is similar to Yoshikawa's. In October of 1996, I witnessed two historical events that took place in Washington D.C. during the same weekend: the first-ever Latino March and the last display of the AIDS quilt. To my disappointment, I found that the Latino March was heavily dictated by a nationalist discourse in which queers and women were rendered invisible while the vigil and other events related to the AIDS quilt were predominantly attended by gay white men; in neither space did I feel as though the reality of women of colour around the world in relation to the AIDS pandemic was acknowledged, particularly female sex workers in Asia or Latina and black women in the U.S. This is a typical example of the struggle for representation within any political movement that privileges some subjects over others and parallels the invisibility of women in queer postcolonial discourse. As narrow definitions of identity and community formation prevail, subjects striving to perform citizenship in temporal hybridity, remain marginalized and must navigate the spaces in between their displaced identities. As activists, artists, cultural workers, and academics, we must continue to explore and build upon these spaces so that subversive hybridities may flourish and continue the project of sexual and racial decolonisation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilar-San Juan, Karin. "Introduction," The State of Asian America. ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. MA: South End Press, 1994.

Amalguer, Tomas. "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior," Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

Cannell, Fennella. "The Power of Appearances: Beauty, Mimicry, and Transformation in Bicol," Discrepant Histories. ed. Vicente L. Rafael. PA: Temple University Press, 1995. 223-258.

DeSouza, Allan. "Flight of/from the Primitive." Third Text 38, Spring (1997):.

Diamond, Catherine. "Quest for the Elusive Self: The Role of Contemporary Philippine Theatre in the Formation of Cultural Identity." The Drama Review 40.1 (1996): 141-169.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks.

Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor

Fung, Richard. "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn." How Do I Look? eds. Bad Object-Choices. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. 145-168.

Gordon, Lewis. Her Majesty's Children.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Manalansan, Martin. Remapping Frontiers: The Lives of Filipino Gay Men in New York. Diss. University of Rochester, New York.

Munoz, Jose. "The Autoethnographic Performance: Reading Richard Fung's Queer Hybridity," Screen 36.2 (1995):.

Rafael, Vicente. "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines." Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Tan, Michael. "Silahis: Looking for the Missing Filipino Bisexual Mal." Bisexualities and AIDS: International Perspectives. ed. Peter Aggleton. UK: Taylor and Francis, 1996. 207-225.

Tan, Michael. "From Bakla to Gay: Shifting Gender Identities and Sexual Behaviors in the Philippines." Conceiving Sexuality. eds. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagnon. New York: Routledge, 1995. 85-96.

Yoshikawa, Yoko. "The Heat is On Miss Saigon Coalition: Organizing Across Race and Sexuality." The State of Asian America. ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Boston: South End Press, 1994. 275-294.

Notes

1. See "The Negro and Psychopathology" from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967;
and Lewis Gordon, "Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World" from Her Majesty's Children. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
2. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe writes about hybridisation as a reflection of the asymmetrical power relations and violence that immigrants face in the United States and the survival strategies that are shaped by the invention and reproduction of cultural alternatives. In writing about Richard Fung's autoethnography, Jose Munoz incorporates an understanding of the relationship between queerness and hybridity as a point of disidentification in that these identity practices are structured around an ambivalent relationship between the West and the rest. He sees hybridity as a useful paradigm for queerness because it accounts for the fragmentation, complexity, and impossibility of identity, which maintains an open-ended subjectivity.
3. Also see Tomas Amalguer, "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior" from the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993.

4. See Jose Munoz, "The Autoethnographic Performance: Reading Richard Fung's Queer Hybridity." Screen 36.2 (1995):.
5. "Bakla" p. 87.
6. "Bakla", p. 96.
7. "Bakla", p. 91.
8. See Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor. : The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942. PA: Temple University Press, 1994.