Description

This presentation examines certain representations of Metropolitan Manila during Martial Law, and the queer attachments, intimacies, and loves in the decaying metropolis. In particular, it analyzes Ishmael Bernal’s film Manila By Night (1980) and Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters (1990). Released during a time when the Marcoses secured rule through an over-production of their conjugal “love team,” and by IMF supported justifications for molding a “beautiful and efficient” Manila, Manila By Night challenges the disciplinary plans for the city and its populace through the presence of queer characters that unabashedly love the dirty, dysfunctional and impoverished city. It was thus the only film that was banned from international screening abroad. In a similar vein, Dogeaters incorporates characters that practice queer love as they navigate a version of Manila antithetical to the one the government and the neo-colonial elite produced for the West. Manilaby Night and Dogeaters center on the city as the quintessential space for queer revolutionary politics. Bernal and Hagedorn re-imagine the urban space as connecting militant forms of queerness across geo-political spaces and temporalities. Both works also highlight the utility of a queer diasporic framework to understanding revolutionary politics during dictatorial rule.

Robert Diaz is an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research areas are Asian North American, Filipino, Gender and Sexuality, and Performance Studies. He has been awarded two Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships from UCLA and USC. His book project, Reparative Acts: Postcolonial Fixations and the Queering of Philippine Nationalisms, examines how diasporic artists queer key figures in contemporary nationalisms in order to expand upon the meanings of historical reparation and monetary redress.