University of Illinois Press

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Author:

Gina K. Velasco

Pub Date:

November 2020

Pages:

176 pages

Dimensions:

6 x 9 in.

Illustrations:

6 black & white photographs

Series:

The Asian American Experience

Asian American Studies Women & Gender Studies Sexuality Studies Labor Studies Asian Studies See all Subjects

Queering the Global Filipina Body

Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Globalization, work, and the images of Filipinas in the media

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.

Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.

"A rich analysis of the transnational circuits of culture, labor, goods, and ideology circulating around the material and symbolic body of the Filipina. With its uniquely nuanced documentation and theorization of multiple, competing nationalisms, this book clear-sightedly accounts, on the one hand, for heteropatriarchy within the Filipino diaspora and, on the other hand, the limits of queer white definitions of desire and liberation."--Sarita See, author of The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance

"In this important book, Velasco critically assembles and analyzes an eclectic queer Filipinx American diasporic archive that includes films, video-art, performances, websites, and a heritage language program. She develops smart and well-written close readings of these materials, and in doing so, she reveals how Filipinx American cultural producers critique the heteropatriarchal nation in the Philippines and US. Velasco’s Queering the Global Filipina Body is a must read in Filipinx Studies, Asian American Studies, feminist studies, LGBTQ Studies and migration studies."--Kale Bantigue Fajardo, author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization

Publication of this book was supported by funding from Gettysburg College.

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Gina K. Velasco is an assistant professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gettysburg College.

University of Illinois