Overview

A lively ethnography of the global and transnational dimensions of gay identity as lived by Filipino immigrants in New York City, ""Global Divas"" challenges beliefs about the progressive development of a gay world and the eventual assimilation of all queer folks into gay modernity. Insisting that gay identity is not teleological but fraught with fractures and fissures, Martin Manalansan describes how Filipino gay immigrants, like many queers of colour, are creating alternative paths to queer modernity and citizenship. In ""Global Divas"", he makes a compelling argument for the significance of diaspora and immigration as sites for investigating the complexities of gender, race, and sexuality Manalansan locates diasporic, transnational, and global dimensions of gay and other queer identities within a framework of quotidian struggles ranging from everyday domesticity to public engagements with racialized and gendered images to life-threatening situations involving AIDS. He reveals the gritty, mundane, and often contradictory deeds and utterances of Filipino gay men as key elements of queer globalization and transnationalism. Through careful and sensitive analysis of these men's lives and rituals, he demonstrates that gay identity is not merely a consumable transnational product or lifestyle. It is, he explains, one pivotal element in the multiple, shifting transnational relationships queer immigrants of colour mobilize in confronting the tribulations of a globalizing world.

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9780822332176

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Reviews

Filipinos are among the world's most energetic and high-profile emigrants and migrant workers... Moreover, they're seen as good-humored and possessing a fun-loving exuberance, at least in the popular imagination.These qualities, together with other attributes, are considered and assessed with admirable caution and wit in this accessible ... book... [M]ore than half the book consists of discussion of the experience of Manalansan's 58 interviewees, and there's plenty there to interest the general reader, especially one alert to the style of one of Asia's most flamboyant peoples. --Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times Nothing is as transforming as viewing the world through another pair of eyes. By illuminating such a specific fragment of multicultural New York, Manalansan sheds light on the universal notion that migration, and travel in general, can be the ultimate reality check. --The Out Traveler [E]ngaging and informative to people of all colors, gay as well as straight, immigrant as well as American... Uplifting, empowering, and provocative... --Ximena Gallardo, Reconstruction A recommended book for academic libraries. --AIDS Book Review Journal From the perspective of studies of modern homosexualities in the West, this book's strength lies in its convincing account of the ways that a community of immigrant men do not passively assimilate themselves to American gay culture but contest and rearticulate Western notions of gayness in building new lives and new forms of same-sex relationships in their adopted home... Manalansan helps us understand the diasporic Filipino homosexual experience in America... --Peter A. Jackson, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies [U]seful for those of us researching sex, sexual and gender differences in these intersections and in intersections with race, ethnicity, and other relationships of power. --Andre P. Grace, Journal of International Migration and Integration [E]ngaging...[C]ompelling. -- Stephen O. Murray, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Global Divas is part of a new and exciting body of literature that disrupts totalizing discourses of globalization within L/G/B/T Studies and popular culture... [I]ts examination of the intersections of class, culture, and citizenship on individual and community identity make it an important text for those of use who write in Global, Ethnic, and/or L/G/B/T Studies. -- Linda Heidenreich, Journal of American Ethnic History

Author Information

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the editor of Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America and coeditor of Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism.

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