Queer Conversation with Martin F. Manalansan IV: Mess, Mundane, and Minoritarian Subjects

Angela Labador AL: Thank you for being with us, Martin. My name is Angela Labador. I'm from De La Salle University (DLSU), and here with me is Ruepert.Ruepert Jiel Cao RJC: Hi, I'm Ruepert. I'm Angela's colleague at the Department of Communication at DLSU. I'm doing research on digital queer cultures, and recently, on queer migration. I find your work really inspiring and useful.I first encountered your work, Martin, as an MA student in Manila. I was doing representations of kabaklaan on Philippine noontime television. That interest on queer representations and queer lives became the focus of my dissertation, specifically on gay pornography on X. I became fascinated by your work when I started investigating Filipino queer migrations in Hong Kong. I am currently studying their everyday lives as a site of identity negotiation, especially amidst racism and xenophobia.AL: For me, it was in my PhD program in the United States. I was taking Karen Leong's gender and sexuality classes, and she asked me if I have encountered Global Divas.1 I was writing on Jennifer Laude2 and the babaylan, and looking at lesbian and bisexual Filipino literature, which you know, there's relatively not as much. So, my understanding of queer was informed by Lore,3 Karen,4 and Cathy Cohen5 on approaching questions of queer from relationality and solidarity.Martin F. Manalansan IV MFM: Indeed, queer is a bit more expansive, not only as an identity category. It is an analytic, to look at how things, bodies, desires, behavior, intersubjective relationalities, and socialities either disrupt or mess up the order of things. My new book is about undocumented immigrants, but my analytic is mess and measurement. I use “mess” as a term with complex multivalent meanings. Mess is not the opposite of order; they're constitutive of each other. It's more of an unfolding rather than a specific condition. It's not like waste or trash. Rather, mess is something that sometimes makes people uncomfortable, because they want order and they want cleanliness. So, they want to get rid of mess.There's an older genealogy of mess, which is not about disorder, but about food. A mess hall is where people eat, like the mess hall in the army, or in African American vernacular. It's a kind of immeasurable unit of measure. African Americans would ask, “What are we having?” They won't say a plate of food or a plate of vegetables. They'll say a mess of greens. So, there's something about how mess involves these, sometimes, elusive notions or scenes that don't adequately render themselves to be captured.I look at queer in everyday life, not just in terms of sexual desire, which is, of course, part of it, but how in everyday life, there are disruptions that seem to be banal or just a minor detail that actually accumulates. It builds up to a sense of the world, of being in the world, of a world itself.So, queer as mess is about world creation and world building. Queer is something that lives, that lived, are part of these kinds of flow of events of bodies collapsing or distancing. Some people think that queer should only be used for LGBTQIA, but I think that misses a lot of the strength and power of queerness. If we go back to the classic definition by Eve Sedgwick,6 it's about the resonances and dissonances of things that don't quite cohere into something cohesive, but then, in some way, render the world differently.RJC: How might mess intersect with how queer migrants use different forms of media in their everyday lives? I'm drawn to how migrants use media to settle into a routine to put some order into their lives, but I'm wondering how these media also contribute to their experiences of messiness.MFM: Mess to me is a necessity, because there's a way in which you routinize things, and routine is an attempt to put order in what people seem to be afraid of: disorder. Routines are shaped by what you learn in movies, family, podcasters, and influencers. These kinds of juxtapositions of mess and order can always be found in everyday encounters.I know I'm being abstract, but I think of fieldwork. Fieldwork is very messy in and of itself. There's no straightforward way in which people answer things. It's not about facts and truth, but it's about the valences and resonances of the encounter.I wouldn't call an ethnographer or field worker a journalist in the way that journalists are about the search for the evidentiary, the factualness of things. To me, fieldwork is a kind of attunement. It's about a compositional attentiveness to surroundings, to bodies, objects, and the “air”; it's atmospheric. I know some people would say there are certain questions answerable in binaries—yes or no, good or bad—which I don't subscribe to, but the value of fieldwork is to illuminate people's behavior, actions, and words that don't have to cohere in a cohesive truth. In fieldwork, you need to step back because at the core of the notion of queer, immigrant, stranger, or foreigner is power hierarchies.In the essay I have in Radical History, which is about queer archives,7 I'm thinking about makeover shows. A makeover is a kind of submission to a capitalist normative notion of the “good life.” Routines are constructed from desires formed by people's reception of these messages. What do influencing and podcasting do? It is about the shaping of desires and tastes.Queer is really less of the spectacle and more of the ordinary.8 More of a challenge for us to seek queerness in the ordinary, because the ordinary is something embedded in the way into which we get socialized. Ordinary becomes part of the ideology into which people get ingrained. So, queer is a way to examine the ideological underpinnings of everyday life. At the end of the day, why do we study what we study? We're looking at minoritarian subjects, people who are powerless in particular spheres of social life. Georges Perec says that we need to go beyond the spectacle and the newspaper headlines, to question the habitual.9To me, his advocacy for this deep noticing, even of the detail, enumerative notions of things: what you ate, what are the things that you see along the way. . . . These kinds of cumulative things render us a bit more sensitive to things that we typically don't question. It subverts virality.So even if I talk about the six undocumented immigrants living in a small apartment in Queens, what is more interesting is how they convey a way of life, of living in messy, cramped conditions that give us an idea of how people live together yet apart. There's a way in which sociality is not always a kind of intimacy, but also a form of distancing. And that silence and deadpanness. . . . It does not mean an emotional void. It actually is a form of performance.The best example in Tagalog is deadma.10 There's a way in which deadma doesn't mean you don't care. You do care, you're just deadma. It's a performance of indifference and detachment that tells us about the complexity of intimacy.I write about care, but is care always about intimacy? No, it's not. It's a variable set of embodied engagements with the world that don't necessarily render themselves as legible in very clean ways. There are ways in which you're maneuvering around particular bodies, particular processes, that allow you to negotiate, resist, or face the challenges without confronting them in very bold terms, especially for disempowered people. Some people are rendered impossible because they live in conditions that don't measure up to the “good life.” So, my work has been about rendering impossible lives possible. This is part of my critique of measurement which is historical about constraint and order (e.g., a “measured approach”).11RJC: It makes me think of my fieldwork with the Filipino gay men who create pornography on X. I was moving from this notion of pornography as text and turning it into pornography as practice, something that people do every day, not just consume.12 Queer pornographers perform their sexual lives in front of the camera for the public to see. What I was thinking about when you were explaining the concepts of messiness, distance, and intimacy is how they're together with their audience, but still manage to be apart from them. How they selectively disclose parts of themselves, how they inhabit the same space with their families, but still manage to be distant from everyone because they don't disclose their identities and their sexual practices to their families. It is messy in so many ways.13 Not just messy in terms of pornography as kalat,14 something that's dirty or unacceptable, but because there are so many things that are outside my control as the ethnographer or of the participants. The messiness going around social media was what probably made me enjoy that fieldwork.MFM: It's an interesting messiness. The way you use pornography, for instance. When is pornography not pornography? Is it because it's commodified? Or if I send you a video of me and someone else, and I don't commodify it, is it pornography? Where the idea of pornography, which is, a contested legal term, becomes just a document, of something that happened like a snapshot, like a family snapshot or a family video, right?But the problem with pornography or about the cinematic text is that there is a danger of using it as a text and actually not thinking about the extratextual, the exogenous: what lies after the last cut?AL: The exogenous prompts me to circle back to when you were talking about queerness in everything. It reminds me of Jose Muñoz's brownness and the brown commons.15 How is your work with mess, queer mess, diverging and converging with that? You mentioned queer as rethinking inequality and habits, the habitual, the habitat, the six undocumented immigrants—how are you thinking through occupation, territory, and dispossession, especially with Palestine? Then, when you were talking about the subversion of virality, I like how it elides optics, and in my own work with anti-imperial organizers, they talk about the optics of solidarity16 and how sometimes to subvert the state, you don't perform this in front of the state.MFM: A lot of my work, and the notion of minoritarian subject comes from Muñoz. Brownness is, in fact, part of the whole critique of queer as intersectional, that it's not never just about gender, never just about class, but it's also about race, particularly in the US context. The larger context in which I'm writing with and writing against is late capitalism, a long history of land occupation and dispossession. There's a reason why working-class immigrants of color live in these dingy apartments in New York. In the present regime, someone says, “These immigrants who are from shithole countries come to dirty the fabric of the US.” So, the rhetoric, in very simplistic terms, is that dirt needs to be eliminated. It's a messiness that needs to be eliminated.But I'm arguing that mess is integral to the system itself. How can we live through a different kind of mess that does not need to be eradicated? Because what does it mean to remove the so-called mess, the so-called dirt?There's a certain kind of vitality to mess that I think we should focus and notice, the way in which people's lives unfold amidst their own creative way of cultivating ethical stances about and towards each other. There's something about the accusation that they're dirt, they don't do anything, they're lazy, or they're just grubby criminals or whatever. But I want to restore or at least reemphasize the dignity of minoritarian subjects in that they are providing lessons on how to live with and despite impossibilities.There's a kind of futurity that is promised by queer of color critique. You can breathe another day, but there's a way in which you can look at another day as a kind of creative response and not just an automatic gasp of breathing for air. It is rather a product of these relationships that people forge, that sustain them, and somehow in some near future might enable them to work things out and change things, however radical or ordinary it may be.RJC: Speaking of queer temporalities, more than two decades after you published on the lives of immigrant bakla in New York, how can we think differently about bakla as a cultural identity, especially now that queer politics and identities are becoming more mainstream and gaining ground? Especially now in the context of Trump administration's attitudes and policies towards immigrants, and queer individuals in general.MFM: You're suggesting what Lisa Duggan has called the homonormative, how certain gay-identified communities have gained normative elite status.17 But there's something about unpredictability, in how history unfolds, that renders these trajectories as less unilineal but diverging. Bakla is not clearly an identity category; it's not an easy identity that people just take on. These social categories are always permeable. They're not solid, they're not packaged. They unravel in particular historical, structural, economic, and political conditions. For some, bakla is used to differentiate particular aesthetic practices, particular kinds of culture-making. What I find fascinating is precisely, shall we say, the relaxed border between bakla and trans.In the 1990s, there was a US regional study where the Philippines was seen as the most tolerant of all.18 But what does that really mean? There's something fascinating about the strength of the moral and religious underpinnings of bakla. They're not necessarily excommunicated from the Catholic Church, but they're not readily assimilated. There's something paradoxical about that, and it has to do with the present conditions of conservative religious and secular politics. But at the end of the day, I don't think the end-all be-all is gay marriage or gay pride parades. What is important is the way, and we have that in the Philippines, a bit more of an expansive creative field of articulating these tensions between identities and behavior.Most people are saying, “Oh, we are no longer as progressive,” but is gay marriage really the benchmark of freedom or the real goal of queerness? It's not, actually. Why is marriage and having families the very apotheosis, the very ideal, the height of what it means to be living a good life?I'm really fascinated with Lauren Berlant's idea of dissociation, distancing, and proxemics.19 There's something about the twenty-first century and late capitalism that has created, according to certain statistics, people who are not married, people who are single, people who live alone, people who are in this malaise of not caring. What Berlant's trying to say is that we need to look at these, not as a symptom of lack, but rather a symptom of something generative, that may be productive of other forms of social life.To go back to your question, Ruepert, there's a way in which bakla becomes the opposite of being global. Like in the work of Bobby Benedicto, who, to be fair, was looking at elite queer Filipinos,20 but I'm more concerned with how globality is not just following the West in terms of gay culture, gay fashion, all that, but really globality is something that is not open to everyone.In that, there's something about the worlding of the bakla that won't necessarily mean that bakla will go away. Certain strands of beliefs and behaviors, of composures, of ways of life endure. I am always suspicious of things that are changing, because we're always looking at trends, what becomes viral, but we tend not to notice, going back to Perec, things that are so banal. We really should be noticing what has continued on, despite all of the weight, the avalanche of new ideas. Philosophically, I am suspicious of the new, because it makes it appear that the new, whatever the new is, is a “break,” when historically, there's never a real break. Old wine in new bottles. Things get packaged, but they're pretty much the same thing.AL: Speaking of enduring attachments and residues, something I have been wondering about ever since is how there isn't the same valence to the tomboy as it is to the bakla. Ruepert and I were also talking about this. Is it the Catholic Church? Is it optics? What's going on there?MFM: There's something enduring about that. It's inequality, even among what we call the gay and lesbian community. Partly, it is the way Western modernity has affected the way we think of domesticity. I co-edited a GLQ special issue on domesticity.21 Domesticity is a Western concept. It's an imperial concept, which rendered the home as the private sphere, and outside the home as the public sphere, and their gender now identified. Female friendships are seen as less threatening. Being gay is seen as more threatening or controversial because men are public.Look at the composition of the US Congress and the Senate, they are mostly white and men. The present regime has outlawed in many very clear ways race and gender. Authoritarianism is this brute masculinity. The cultural war props up authoritarianism. But if you fight them, if you forge on with feminist, queer, and Marxist critics, then it will destabilize authoritarian rule. Dictators want everyone to be thinking in very restrictive terms. The danger to authoritarianism is to think beyond the binary. To think beyond these kinds of clear-cut, good and bad, and study the everyday, the contextuality of things, the contingency of things, the things that are always in flux.The danger posed by different kinds of critical theory is exactly how they might disrupt authoritarian mechanical thinking. So, queer theory was never about just documenting queer lives, of needing more rights, of needing to let them love who they love. I was part of a generation that thought of a broader notion of so that gay without other forms of And that's where I think of queer as a broader of up of social and ideological a about by Lisa Duggan and Jose where we not I write someone will queer of color and they will say, “Oh, that's way or other my way of cultivating something that will be a product of my A of understanding is a that I always to, that what I write is something that can people in a particular to with me or to find something but to at least their way of are not these because even as you you're always doing Routines are not these that you day day They're not just notion of the ethical and the moral in terms of a kind of are not just or The ordinary, as a a and a