by Rudolf P. Gaudio
The 2003 Ruth Benedict Prize was awarded to
Martin F. Manalansan IV at the SOLGA business meeting in Chicago for his book, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, published by Duke University Press (December 2003).
The prize committee, consisting of Suparna Bhaskaran, Lawrence Cohen, and Rudolf Gaudio, considered five monographs for the award. (Two anthologies were also submitted and will be considered for a separate prize next year.) Global Divas took the prize for the innovative way it combines rich ethnographic description with theoretical sophistication, as well as the contributions it makes to a variety of scholarly and activist conversations.
The book is divided into two sections. These can be broadly construed as theoretical and ethnographic, respectively, though one immediately discovers that the perspectives are thoroughly intertwined. What unites them is Manalansan's careful attention to language, space and performance in the lives of his subjects.
In the first section Manalansan uses his subjects’ linguistic and spatial practices to construct his analytical framework. After opening with an extended discussion of Filipino gay men’s uses of the identity labels bakla and gay, Manalansan provides a rich ethno-linguistic account of swardspeak, a queer language variety in which the concepts of biyuti (cf. English “beauty”) and drama serve as central idioms of performance and interpretation. The final chapter in this section focuses on the ways Filipino gay men’s experiences of social space in New York City and the ways they use queer-identified spaces and places to negotiate their transnational positionality.
The second section provides thick descriptions of Filipino gay men's performances in specific social contexts characterized by displacement, exclusion, suffering and celebration. It is here that Manalansan’s theoretical goals achieve full flower as he plays with virtually the whole range of dominant analytical tropes from the past decade of (queer) anthropological research and writing. With an initial focus on the interactional routines and spaces that characterize everyday life, Manalansan situates his subjects’ quotidian struggles within a “drama of survival” that has as much to do with race, class and legal citizenship as it does with gender and sexuality. The centrality of class is especially refreshing, carefully framed, and distinguishes the text from many others.
The final two chapters address more specific (and poignant) social contexts. In one, Manalansan analyzes the public performance of a Filipino Catholic ritual called the Santacruzan at Manhattan’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center. Combining humor and reverence, affection and satire, Manalansan explains how this event articulated the performers’ claims to belonging and citizenship within the contested domains of both the (U.S. and transnational) gay community and the postcolonial Filipino nation. By comparing the Manhattan Santacruzan with a one-man show by Filipino gay performance artist Ralph Peña, this chapter also troubles the boundaries between the academic disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies, and between Asian-American and Asian area studies as well.
Manalansan concludes Global Divas on a historical—and historicizing—note, looking back on Filipino gay men’s late-twentieth-century struggles with AIDS and ahead towards the potential trajectories of academic and political work. It is not simply the case that AIDS has transformed Filipino gay men’s lives (though it has); using the familiar moniker Tita Aida, Filipino gay men have also confronted and transformed the inescapable role of AIDS in their lives. With neither undue optimism nor maudlin pathos, Manalansan anticipates more courageous and outrageous engagements on the part of diasporic Filipino gay men with the persistent forces of displacement, exclusion, drama and biyuti.
