MEDIA, EROTICS, AND TRANSNATIONAL ASIA

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4559-6

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1INTRODUCTION mediations and Transmediations: Erotics, Sociality, and “Asia” PURNIMA MANKEKAR AND LOUISA SCHEIN………………………………………….33CHAPTER 1 Wayward Erotics: Mediating Queer Diasporic Return MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV………………………………………………………………….53CHAPTER 2 For Your Reading Pleasure: Self-Health (Ziwo Baojian) Information in Beijing in the 1990s JUDITH FARQUHAR……………………………………..75CHAPTER 3 Zines and Zones of Desire: Mass-Mediated Love, National Romance, and Sexual Citizenship in Gay Indonesia TOM BOELLSTORFF………………………..111CHAPTER 4 Correspondence Marriages, Imagined Virtual Communities, and Countererotics on the Internet NICOLE CONSTABLE……………………………………139CHAPTER 5 Flows Between the Media and the Clinic: Desiring Production and Social Production in Urban Beijing EVERETT YUEHONG ZHANG………………………..173CHAPTER 6 Dangerous Desires: Erotics, Public Culture, and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century India PURNIMA MANKEKAR……………………………………..203CHAPTER 7 Homeland Beauty: Transnational Longing and Hmong American Video LOUISA SCHEIN………………………………………………………………233CHAPTER 8 Another Kind of Love? Debating Homosexuality and Same-Sex Intimacy through Taiwanese and Chinese Film Reception SARA L. FRIEDMAN…………………267CHAPTER 9 Born Under Western Eyes: The Politics and Erotics of the Documentary Gaze in Born into Brothels HEATHER DELL…………………………………..297CHAPTER 10 American Geishas and Oriental/ist Fantasies ANNE ALLISON………………………………………………………………………………..323References……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………357Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….359

Chapter One

MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV

WAYWARD EROTICS

Mediating Queer Diasporic Return

My life in the Philippines ended when the plane left Ninoy Aquino (Manila’s international airport) and I flew to America. I was okay with my gay life in New York. Then I went back [to the Philippines] for a visit and I became confused. The moment my plane touched Philippine soil—it was like an avalanche of feelings. Suddenly, I was confronted with my old crushes, new sexual opportunities—people thought I was hot because I lived in New York. There were also a lot of good and bad memories, people you don’t want to see and people you are desperate to see one more time for … you know. [wink] —CARLO (TRANSLATED FROM TAGALOG)

The words of Carlo in the epigraph to this chapter prefigure the arguments, ideas, and voices that follow. Carlo is a gay Filipino man who immigrated to the United States in 1987, and his statement evokes the complexities, nuances, and rhythms of queer diasporic return. While aspects of diasporic queers’ stories about homecoming may parallel those of other migrants, they radically diverge due to queers’ vexed relationship with home and the complex erotic underpinnings of the act of returning to the homeland. Diasporic return not only involves tearful reunions with family and friends, but visits to memorable places. It could unleash, as Carlo has intimated above, an “avalanche” of encounters, anxieties, desires, acts, and longings that pivot around the erotic. Here, the erotic does not function as a travel signpost leading to a definitive destination, but opens up messy entanglements and engagements with sexual, gendered, familial, national, and transnational affinities.

This chapter emerges out of these complex articulations of home, desire, fantasy, and memory. What follows is an attempt to tease out these complexities by focusing on the meanings around the erotic dimensions of queer diasporic return in the film Miguel/Michelle. In other words, I chart the ways the film provides a text and a stage for the contestation of competing meanings around queer identities, and the discrepant forms of travel and erotics in the Philippine diaspora.

The film is about a Filipino male immigrant to the United States, who after gender reassignment surgery comes back to Manila as a woman after a few years. Miguel, who leaves for the United States, comes back as Michelle, ostensibly to receive an award from her alma mater for being an outstanding graduate who made good abroad. However, her return is transformed into a public revelation or “coming out” of her new self and body. After a riotous homecoming at the airport, where her mother faints in disbelief, Michelle confronts her hometown and its people, with their varying reactions and opinions. The high school attempts to rescind her award, and in the ensuing debacle, she begins a tortuous odyssey with family, queer and heterosexual friends, and neighbors. While she is able in large part to win over the townspeople in the end, she decides to go back to the United States.

The film was produced and first screened in Manila in 1998. It was directed by Gil Portes, who was able to distribute the film for viewing in various film festivals (most of which were lesbian and gay focused) in U.S. cities such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Tempe, from 1999 to 2004. It is still available for sale or rent in various video shops in Filipino communities in the United States. The film enjoyed a wider distribution than most films produced in the Philippines and has “traveled” widely.

At the heart of the film and the critical core of this chapter is the idea of diasporic return to the homeland. Scholars such as Robin Cohen (1997) and James Clifford (1992) have suggested that return haunts the past, present, and future of all diasporas. Traditional social science literature on diasporas insists on return as an inevitable and logical outcome of emigration. This romantic notion is based on the primacy and stability of homeland origins. It is also premised on the idea that return is about a completion of the cycle of diasporic travel and, by implication, a fulfillment or filling in of the lack or void that originally precipitated the initial departure.

Such traditional formulations of diaspora are focused on masculinist and heteronormative constructions of travel and home. Traditional renderings of diasporic travel naturalize links between heterosexuality, family life, masculinity, and modernity. In Philippine discourses before the late 1980s, diasporic travel was often embodied in the heterosexual male who travels both for adventure and for the survival and well-being of his reproductive family. Life abroad was constructed as being filled with danger and risks. During the height of the mostly male labor migration to the Middle East in the seventies, several popular representations constructed this labor destination as one of sexual peril, including accounts where Filipino men have been raped by their Middle Eastern male employers. Therefore, diasporic return in these discourses was portrayed as an escape or refuge from the horrors of elsewhere and includes the validation and claiming of masculine authenticity and normativity. At the same time, it involved the recognition of the returnee’s modernity. The act of traversing political and geographic borders more often than not conferred cosmopolitan modernity on the returnee. However, these formulations or ideas about diaspora and return were unable to capture the nonlinear and messy itineraries that deviate from the ideal norm.

This male-centered view of migration was held to be true until the late eighties, when a major gender shift occurred in Filipino labor migration in response to demands by the global labor market. Filipino women have outnumbered males in the labor flow out of the Philippines for the past fifteen or more years (Parreñas 2001). At the same time, male-inflected and heteronormative conceptions of domesticity and travel still permeate national discourses. While female labor migrants have been hailed as the new heroines by the state, they also have to confront the ambivalence of Philippine society that still upholds patriarchal arrangements of family and reproduction. It is this larger context of social ambivalence, dire economic conditions, and gendered and sexualized conceptions of home and diasporic movement that frame the discussion of the film.

Utilizing multisited fieldwork in New York and Manila to inform an ethnographically based reading of the cinematic text, this chapter has multiple aims. The first aim is methodological, that is, to deconstruct the notion of a “queer audience” and to highlight the multiple modes of reception and interpretation of the film. By deploying the ideas and experiences of two groups of queer interviewees in these two cities, I demonstrate how ethnography provides a method as well as a framework for the study of cinematic reception that includes the intersection of erotic desire, migration, and global culture. The film’s dissemination requires a dynamic view of audience reception that hinges on notions of home, embodiment, and mobility. As such, this study reflects not only on the vicissitudes of the film’s “life” but also on the methodological rigors of studying the shifting terrains of cultural production and consumption in the contemporary globalizing world. My aim is not a straightforward comparison of the audience groups in the two cities. I am more concerned about how both groups deploy intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses around the homeland, the migrant body, and erotics, and how they enable a culturally rich reading of the filmic text. By highlighting these discourses, I complicate the connections between the two groups and the idea of transnational mediation. However, I am not in any way suggesting that one group can stand in for another. My intent is to show both divergences and fluid intersections of ideas rather than lining these groups into parallel and separate, independent entities.

The second and more important aim is to explore deterritorialized erotics in Filipino, queer diasporic return. Using the term “erotics,” I follow the ideas of anthropologists Purnima Mankekar (2004) and Louisa Schein (2004), who point to the ways desire is mediated transnationally through film, television, and other media forms. For them, erotics extend beyond “sex acts or desires for sex acts [and are] enmeshed also in fantasy, everyday practice, social relationships and political institutions” (Mankekar and Schein 2004, 358). Furthermore, they argue that the “erotic” sets the stage for the performance of social anxieties and tensions and is “centrally implicated in the construction of hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity” (358). This chapter, then, can be seen in part as a response to the challenge made by Schein “to pluralize eroticisms, analytically distributing them more evenly over the variety of desiring subjects that are players in diasporic contexts rather than situating eroticism primarily in the overprivileged body of the travelling, migrant male” (Schein 1999b, 725).

Diasporic return is constituted by various motivations, temporalities, and modalities. Some scholars have resorted to creating a typology of various modes of diasporic return that include provisional returns, forced returns, or the kind of return that exists primarily in the imagination (Long and Oxfeld 2004). Diasporic return is also a mediated concept shaped and inflected by biographies, histories, and power structures (Long and Oxfeld 2004; Louie 2004). However, Louisa Schein (1999b) astutely suggests that diasporic return, despite all its inflections, is primarily constituted by corporeal and sensory experiences and practices that are embedded in a specific form of erotics. She further suggests that the homeland is a site for “both capital accumulation and for erotic entanglements” (1999b, 699). Therefore, homeland attachments are pivotal in the enunciations of the sexual, the national, and the erotic. In her study of the circulation, production, and reception of Hmong American videos, Schein explores the notion of “homeland erotics” to signal the intertwining processes of displacement and emplacement in nationalist feelings and sexual longings (1999b, 699). She seeks to “link the complex of desires that saturate the figure of the homeland(s) with the corporeality of eroticism” (1999b, 724).

Following and expanding on Schein’s ideas, I examine the figuration of the queer diasporic returnee and how return migration or diasporic return is eroticized and mediated through cinematic and quotidian arenas. The term “wayward erotics” may be used to highlight how “homeland erotics” involve insubordinate or recalcitrant forms of practices, institutions, and meanings that constitute queer diasporic phenomena—forms of erotics that refuse or deflect being anchored to linear, romantic directionality and simplistic filial links to homelands. Wayward erotics are based on the idea of the indeterminacy and instability of the links between body, desire, place, and time. This goes against the view of change as progress deployed in understanding migration and modernity. Instead, wayward erotics suggest the unsettling of gender and sexual identifications and the messy, crisscrossing traffic of erotic acts, bodies, desires, identities, and fantasies. Using multivalent meanings constructed out of lives and experiences in the Filipino queer diaspora, I refigure the idea of diasporic return that is also constituted by queer bodies and desires pivoting around the paradoxical and changing politics of national, sexual, and gender affiliations.

Deconstructing the Filipino “Queer” Audience: Reflections on Method and Context

The cinema scholar Chris Berry (1996) extolled the virtues of film as the vehicle par excellence of globalizing gay cultures. Note that my use of “gay,” rather than “queer,” particularly in world marketing of such films as Miguel/ Michelle, is intentional and follows the kind of identification and labeling practices in this specific burgeoning film industry. I use “queer” to cover the range of possible identifications among the men I interviewed. Far from being an innocent conveyor or vehicle of ideas, “gay” cinema in various film festivals and special screenings is suffused with the contradictions and ambivalences of transnational and cross-cultural encounters and linkages.

Film is not a self-contained unit that logically unravels and unleashes its pedagogical apparatus to willing passive pupils. At the same time, I am wary of and dissatisfied with the ubiquitous abstracted notion of “spectatorship” in cultural and film studies that actually privileges a specific authorial voice and cultural background, that of the scholar’s. Rather, I suggest that the so-called unsuspecting public and the nameless hordes of disembodied eyes in dark screening rooms are in fact culturally knowledgeable bodies and lives that actively engage with and interpret the ideas and images on the screen.

The media scholar Ien Ang (1996) argued for “deconstructing the audience,” by which she meant paying close and critical attention to the ethnographic specificities and local conditions under which these subjects operate. The group of queer audience members that I interviewed for this project are part of an emergent transnational flow of ideas, images, and bodies in what some scholars have touted as the globalization of queer identities (Adams, Duyvendank, and Krouwel 1998; Altman 1996; Cruz-Malave and Manalansan 2002; Gopinath 2005; Manalansan 2003; Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). Film festivals, organized tours, festivals, and other events have been considered evidence of this process. However, far from homogenizing or cleanly bifurcating the audiences across the two sites, the differences and similarities are more complex than they would seem at first glance. Easy cultural relativism or universalism cannot adequately or critically encompass the diverse and “messy” ideas presented by these informants.

The two groups of viewers, in Manila and New York, should not be seen as two monolithic groups that are anchored to place. Rather, it is crucial to understand the audiences as grounded in and at the same time exceeding their respective geographical locations. Informants’ ideas intersect each other. My ethnographic practice and philosophy around this project highlight the increasing interconnections and traffic between the two sites in order to dislodge the idea of “distinct” communities and promotes the fact that people are increasingly “in transit” both in imagination and fantasy and during actual physical travel. They are involved in intricate and multifaceted contacts with each other through e-mail, financial remittances, visits, and phone calls, and through films, magazines, and other mass-media forms. These men and women do not form a rigid statistical sample; they come close to being nodes spread out in a transnational flow or circuit of ideas, bodies, and desires (Appadurai 1996).

What are the implications of these ideas for my ethnographic analysis? These men’s and women’s voices provide motivations and counterarguments that need to be read in terms of their cultural and historical specificities as well as in terms of convergences brought about by these transnational flows. These men’s and women’s narratives, voices, and opinions follow place-based contexts while at the same time exceeding them. In other words, the materiality of place-based contexts should be read with and balance out the intersecting transnational connections between the two spaces and histories.

Each group therefore does not form a single, coherent cluster of a single time and place. In fact more than two-thirds of these informants were interviewed individually and were not part of the audience of a singular theater screening of the film. A third of them watched the video version in their own homes. These informants were chosen primarily for their having watched the film and having identified as gay, bakla, or “trannie,” or operada, the swardspeak term for transsexual. But this identity requirement is complicated by the fact that most of the informants identified with more than one identity category. The hard and fast requirements for the informants were that that they identified as Filipinos, had some queer identification, and they primarily lived in one of the two cities.

The choice to use the informal ethnographic-interview method with two loosely formed groups was based on the idea that more formal methods may not have yielded the nuanced reading I set out to do. While I depart from the abstracted “spectatorship” studies of the more literarily inclined scholars, I refrain from employing rigid empiricist methods of surveys from the more social scientific ones. Purnima Mankekar, in her study of female television viewers in India (2004), argues that she depended not only on the literal words and voices of her informants but, more crucially, on the silences, gaps, and discursive maneuvers of informants and the vagaries of the ethnographic encounters. I would argue that media-audience study is not a study of objects but, following Mankekar, it is an empathetic engagement with subjects and discourses in flux and in transit.

(Continues…)

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