Biyuti and Drama

1. Biyuti and Drama Martin Manalansan Presented by: Chesley Zhu and Keith McDade

2. Manalansan • Conducted research from 1990-1995 focusing on the various strategies of identity articulation and self- formation of Filipino gay iimigrants. • Built around fifty life history interviews of Filipino gay immigrants who have a median age of thirty-one and have lived in the United States from two years to thirty years • “I am interested in the interscalar connections between the lived locality and the larger seemingly more expansive sites of the city, the nation, and the global. More important, this essay is a response to the over-valorization of circuits and flows in the study of queer globalization and transnationalism; it highlights how queer subjects mediate these processes.” [147] • his study does not focus so much on their daily lives, but rather it points to the complexities of various intersections and borderlands of race, gender, class and sexuality in diasporic and immigrant groups. • Focus on everyday life shows the disguise of the ordinary and the commonplace to lay bare the intricate and difficult hybrid negotiations between the upper class and lower class.

3. Intimacy • “crucial yet ambivalent practice in modern life because of its connections to domesticated and normative forms of relationships and space such as home, family, and privacy.” • Queers struggle to find, build, remember, and settle into a home, they cant assimilate due to the displacements from migration, and they can not create a sphere of diasporic intimacy. • Diasporic intimacy • Struggles that show the various ways that the outside world intrudes and disseminates the private spaces of home and how the dispersed deal with that. • “everday life is the space for examining the creation and rearticulation of queer selves in the diaspora.” [148] • analysis shaped by biyuti and drama, two Filipino slang words used by gay men; swardspeak, which showcases hybrid cultural engagements of Filipino gay men; mix of English, tagalog, Spanish. • Creates identity

4. Biyutiand Drama Biyutican refer to your aesthetics; “physical beauty, health, personhood, social being, fate.” But can almost mean just about anything pertaining to that individual’s identity • Drama refers to one’s sexual orientation, or occupation, health, and daily travails • These idioms only pertain to those that inhabit the southeast Asian islands and does not reach to the westernized gay populous - differing gay cultures

5. The Story of an Apartment Arrived in ’71 and lived with his female cousin in new jersey. Parents wanted a reliable guardian but the cousin upon arrival declared she would not look after him and reprimanded he become more responsible and self reliant • Need to be like this to succeed in America, no one will look after you. • Surprised at first but Alden adapted and admitted it was “a different drama”

6. Left several years later and found his current apartment • Significant because it was the first time he had his own room in his life, thus ushering in the primordial stages of his OWN world • Freedom to truly express his flamboyant gay side with impunity from his family • He has a corner dubbed “the guilt corner” or “Filipino corner” • Family pictures, religious altars, family relics • Called “guilt corner” because he lacks free time to call his family overseas and would stare at this corner to prompt a call home due to guilt • Also used this corner as a confession room, often praying for forgiveness after sexual encounters with men • Also has two sides: an American side and a Filipino side • He feels like he goes back and forth even when he’s not in the Philippines. • Diasporic intimacy, can’t feel fully at home even in his home thus demarcating the two spheres of his life; can not assimilate completely • “constant engagements with expriences of emplacement and displacement.” • Transnational connection • Separate walls show his desire and propriety

7. Everyday Routes to Gay Modernity • Roldan, forty-year-old informant, came to US in the ‘80s • Spends his days working or doing chores and works at an office • He notes that his coworkers treat him differently due to his biyuti being Asian • Asians are associated with femininity and frailness • “White Love”

8. He had pre conceived notion of gayness in america as ultramasculine, which did not encompass his traits as a gay man • Wasn’t until he went to a cross-dressing bar did he feel like himself because he could be effeminate and gay • Fears being caught cross-dressing in public however because he is afraid to be deported since he is undocumented • His biyuti is TNT (swardspeak meaning “always in hiding”) reinforcing the idea that biyuti can literally mean anything pertaining to the individual • Uses an umbrella term “bakla” to describe his version of being gay that encompasses cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and effeminacy • Similar to the term queer, which is now used synonymously with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender • Family dependent of his financial remittances

9. Family overseas expects him to play surrogate father to his sister, bestows great responsibility on him • Wishes to be free from those one day • Sister wants to get married • Also attends church, remarks that “you can really mistake this drama for anything but Filipino” referring to petitions for better health and safe trips to the Philippines and receiving green cards/ passing nurse license exams

10. Staging Queer Diasporic Lives • Reaffirms that immigrants from the third world “perceive themselves onstage, their lives resembling a mediocre fiction with occasional romantic outbursts and gray dailiness.” [154] • Fantasy Production • Citizenship for queers is about survival and making it • Disaporic queers refuse to assimilate and carry baggage with them upon relocation causing displacement as shown by Alden’s “guilt corner” and Roldan’s link to his family back home as father figure • Their selfhood and belonging (biyuti and drama) shaped by cultural transition • Biyuti and Drama

11. Biyuti and Drama • Negotiated space between tradition and modernity as queer immigrants move between loca, national and global spaces; liminality • Alternative form of modernity • Bakla culture is not dependent on western queer culture

12. Alden feels homecoming when thoughts arise after sexual encounters or forgetting to call his family because he has strong ties with home still; causes an ambivalent and troubled relationship between “being at home” and “homecoming” • Perpetual motion, shuttling between settling in and feeling displaced • Never feels fully settled because his actions harken back to his life in the Philippines • Ties to the family allows Alden and Roldan the chance to escape their assimilated lives and “return” home

13. Roldan feels society’s concept of race and gender disseminates into the his drama involving confrontations, disputes, and obedience • To Roldan, bakla is the gay counterculture to the gay culture • Destabilized a monolithic gay identity, rather than detracting from modernity

14. A Cautionary Hopefulness • Filipino gay men are creating an alternative route for selfhood and belonging despite the unrelenting forces of globalization and the weight of western institutions and practices.” [157] • Daily life for gay Filipino men constituted by the drama of survival and biyuti to belong • Transformative potential

15. Diaspora of Identify. • Inability to find reconciliation with differing identities. • Tension between “intimate”, “private” and “search for home” • Alden shifts between his “Guilt Corner” and “American Wall”. • Roldan fears his queer identity might reveal his immigration status. Tension between family obligations and personal life. • Living critiques/challenges of established norms of family and domestic relationships. • Applying gendered terms to friends to differentiate from sexual partners • Taking on a “bakla” identity (in regards to Roldan )

16. Filipinos Living in a time of War • “In fighting” relatable to Tadiar’s discussion. • Sense of competition and jealousy • Sense of hierarchy in minority group • Ostracization or exclusion by those not fulfilling norm (being too effeminate, poor English, appearing “fresh off the boat”