The list below — “dusted with glitter, sparkles and fairy dust” — comes from an unnamed Pinay university professor from the Northeast United States. (I suspect the title of her unnamed forthcoming book would be a perfect candidate for this list, but she didn’t want to jinx it.)

A mini-list of factoids:

1. I’m not posting the other companion list (Anacleto’s Structurally Queer Siblings, or A List of Drag Queen Names of Some Filipino Academics in Random Order of Fabulousness), simply because there were too many in-jokes to interest the general reader. I can’t even remember who “Anacleto” was supposed to be.

But let’s just say that “Martina Navratilova Manalansan” had a wonderful ring to it. (It’s also the oldest in terms of provenance, I think.) “Li’l Kim Alidio” sounded great too.

2. A particularly filthy (and bad) pun on, um, a seminal Filipino American text — let’s just say it involved Carlos Bulosan and a boner — was originally on the list, but Neferti asked everyone, “Let’s not go there,” so we didn’t.

3. People cheated on three titles by adding new subtitles, or changing them around, in the grand tradition of Shaving Ryan’s Privates. But that’s absolutely fine. It was nice to discover that Displaying Filipinos actually allowed for many variations (“displaying”, “splaying”, “playing”, and “laying”), but obviously its porn-title possibilities were completely accidental. No, really.

4. I can’t categorically say I wasn’t involved in this, but I was mostly a spectator in the back seat while this was all happening. The list was further refined in the hotel lobby. The chardonnay helped.

5. The order is not mine, though Dylan was upset. “How could I not be Number One??” he asked.

And this is how it all went down:

——
The Top Ten Porn-Sounding Philippine and Filipino American Studies Book Titles:

1. White Love
2. Forced Passages
3. Splaying Filipinos
4. Fantasy Production
5. American Tropics 14: Sequel to Forced Passages (“It’s a compilation,” Allan said, by way of explanation.)
6. Creating Masculinity: Behind the Scenes of White Love
7. Five Faces of Sexile
8. Passion and Revolution (Soft)
9. The Gangster of Love
10. The Philippine Temptation

Popularity: 37% [?]

My fantastic weekend just came to a close, and tomorrow I return to my 9-to-5 “exit strategy / escape route” job. I can’t say enough about the intellectual energy of the roundtables, and the superior quality of the circulated papers (which I devoured — you have no idea how much exciting stuff is out there, and about to be published), and just the overwhelming sense of fun.

(Can I add as well that the late-night discussions — actually, they started at dinner — in the hotel lobby were just transgressively, hilariously filthy? Readers will see some sanitized examples shortly, but I don’t think I’ll be reproducing the Pinoy Academic Drag Queen Names list here, partly because mine just doesn’t sound sexy enough. I expect it to be sent by email from the northeast pretty soon.)

And now for more random non-intellectual musings. I must confess that, despite my excitement (and temperatures in the teens notwithstanding), I was worried and fearful about being the lone, unaffiliated non-academic interloper presenting at the conference. I honestly didn’t feel particularly worthy to be included with all these luminaries. It had already taken me about a year of difficult readjustment to get used to the idea that I was now an Ex-Professor. (Any resemblance to “ex-parrot” is deliberate.) Amazing, really, how the academic life seems to be the perfect breeding ground for ontological insecurity — but then I really know of no other career.

These anxieties (mostly) melted away once I got there — not necessarily because my feelings of self-worth magically increased, but because I suddenly felt like I belonged somewhere. It helped that I personally knew probably a good five-sixths of the participants (and of course met and talked with the other one-sixth later). But there was also a keen historical sense on my part — mostly engendered by Rey Ileto’s fascinating keynote address on scrapbooks — of how these linkages and networks were forged throughout the years in classrooms, in conferences, in libraries, in hotel lobby bars, in textual exchanges. After all, these were folks whose books I had taught, or had read, looked up to, informed my own work, been on panels with, e-mailed, gotten drunk with, and so on, throughout my relatively long adventures in higher education. Half my life — essentially, my life outside of the Philippines — has been spent in that arena, and these were most of the people who were present, both physically and symbolically, in that journey.

There’s a lot of negative talk about “the Filipino community” — the general hollowness of the concept, the way it’s used as an anti-intellectualish cudgel to beat the recalcitrant into submission (and ha! I contribute to that discussion as well), or as the amorphous, blobby mass to which Filipino American scholars and activists must pay obeisance (and not dare criticize). But the genuine intellectual acuity and emotional warmth of this particular Filipino community cannot be denied.

And as much as the word “family” can be abused in a heteronormative fashion (and honest to god, some people have to learn that the social sciences really aren’t that heteronormative), I have come to see, especially in recent years, this group of intellectuals as members of my extended family. (We Filipinos are supposed to be expert practitioners of fictive kinship after all.) And yes, families can be fucked up, and sibling rivalries will always exist, but such networks can also be the basis of enduring intellectual and affective solidarities, from which more political work and critique (both of the self and others) can be done. I honestly can’t think of a more generous, supportive, wonderful (and good-looking!) group of scholars anywhere as the ones I hung out with this weekend, for whom I will be forever thankful.

So — thanks and congratulations to the organizers, August Espiritu and Martin Manalansan (who’s currently Acting Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), for an amazing, unforgettable conference. (And curse you too for making me radically rethink my career trajectory! Again!)

Popularity: 1% [?]

A lesson learned: Never, ever deliver a conference paper when you’ve only had four hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. I was supposed to deliver the paper below:

In this paper, I explore performance and improvisation among Filipino overseas musicians. In 2003, over 58,000 Filipinos were scattered worldwide in nightclubs and hotel lounges; however, the majority of people who migrate as Overseas Performing Artists (OPAs) travel to work in Japan. OPA is, in this instance, a euphemistic, bureaucratic category that denotes the sex trade, and comprises the crucial distinction between Filipinos working in Japan and those elsewhere working as more professional musicians.

Despite such differences, I argue that the practices of performance and improvisation, both as musical activities and as metaphors for everyday migrant life, link both kinds of OPAs. In my interviews, OPA returnees constantly spoke of a spontaneous and naturally Filipino ability to imitate. This imitative performance, however, did not allow for musical improvisation; they were limited to learning and mimicking particular idioms from a globally shared musical repertoire.

Such practices, I argue, parallel the relationship between state and individual. One can see performance and improvisation as strategies utilized to compete with restrictive migration policies, to evade state surveillance, or, more ordinarily, to resist drunken customers. As an economic strategy, migration also exemplifies a kind of adaptability, also directly related to improvisation or imitation.

My paper is also a critique of government policies that enable, if not facilitate, the exploitation of migrant labor. Simultaneously, through emphasis of migrant practices, I treat OPAs as rational and creative actors, incessantly performing and improvising, even if constrained by the regulations of the state and the demands of capital.

Et cetera, et cetera, until I realized that it had ballooned into an unmanageable 30 pages when it was still only really halfway done and I had to boil it down to about 7 pages for the presentation. So I painfully hacked off the entire “improvisation” section, threw out all the lovely ethnographic detail and whatnot, including a “thick description” of a performance of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” and came up with 6 pages. All of this surgery done the night before I was to teach three classes and hop on a redeye from SF. Not good. (Thankfully a MARTA ride from the airport to Buckhead was only $1.75.)

So I gave my talk — my fellow panelists’ papers on Filipino Americans in post-war Filipino cinema, the Black-Eyed Peas’ “The Apl Song” video, and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (plus a big helping of Baudrillard) were far more interesting than mine — and had to run off with Izzy to the Children’s Museum of Atlanta, which was only really okay. (It was too late to get tickets to the aquarium.) Izzy really liked the Rube Goldberg-like contraption which, among other things, made it possible for you to drop wet balls onto unsuspecting people’s noggins. Nothing like wet balls. (Okay — the first person to tell me which John Irving novel that comes from wins… well, nothing.) I missed everything else on Saturday, since I spent most of the day zonked with Izzy, but that was fine.

None of the pictures you see here were posted with anyone’s permission, but I’ll be happy to take them offline.

The 40-plus folks who ended up congregating in front of the hotel were then organized and split by Rick, who we see conducting the orchestra here:

The heat lamps reminded him of the tropics — or, in a reference to Allan’s forthcoming book, American Tropics. (We heard the phrase “American tropics” used a lot throughout the conference, just like the phrase “basketball court” — but youngsters may be reading this, so I won’t explain it.)

About half of the crowd. Martin’s in a silly mood:

Half went to a Hawaiian fusion food restaurant, which was the wise choice. “I didn’t go all the way to Atlanta to eat Hawaiian food,” said Theo, who ended up going with us to the jaw-droppingly expensive Brazilian restaurant where you could eat (as Theo said later), “the entire cast of The Lion King on skewers.”

Meat:

I can’t find my photo of Gladys’ neater plate (she was sitting next to me).

I can’t remember the exact context for this picture, but here it is, preserved for posterity:

Later, at the hotel lobby, the sated Filipinos, fueled by beer, vodka tonics and Brazilian cremes de menthe, regrouped — Kiko, Lucy, Rick, Liz, Theo, Robyn, Linda floating in and out (her book just came out), and I can’t remember who else right now — where discussion ensued: somewhat lurid talk with Tony (his co-edited book just came out too), the Manila music scene, rather tame AAS gossip, and Rex Navarrete. (Someone explained their discomfort at his humor, saying that he was essentially making fun of the working-class generation of her immigrant parents. This is not an incorrect observation, and his more recent enthusiastic reception in Manila by the well-heeled suggests, I think, a decidedly classist tinge to all the laughter at the declassed middle class and lower-middle class Filipinos who followed the doctors and engineers to American shores.)

Anyhow, the next day we had our Filipino caucus, where we discussed our Plans to Take Over The World. But outside the meeting room, I figured we had a bit of a way to go:

Popularity: 1% [?]

The cover of last month’s issue of Filipinas Magazine had the caption “Sex and the Single Manong, ca. 1940.” I was, perhaps irrationally, hoping for some hot man-on-man action, but I knew what to expect: the men-to-women ratio, the taxi dance halls, the riots, prostitutes following the migrants from camp to camp and harvest to harvest, that California businessman calling Filipinos “hot little rabbits,”* the fascination with white women, reading between the lines of America Is In The Heart about Bulosan’s blondes and wondering what the deal was with all these white women wandering in and out of the narrative.

It’s quite obvious and understandable how historiography regarding the manong generation proceeded this way: in a community full of fairly devout Catholics, and a nascent second/third-generation (het-male) Filipino American identity that was effectively emasculated in current American popular culture, it was no wonder that this — I’m thinking of a good word — rampant male heterosexuality became regnant in Filipino American Studies. There’s nothing like a threat to masculinity to get one’s, um, dander up — if “one” were a predominantly male and perhaps proudly heterosexual group of Filipino American scholars in the ’60s and ’70s. The party line, if one could call it that, was that the manongs were playas — the suits! the white women! the slicked-back hair! — supported very clearly by the very real white perception of Filipinos as sexual threats, with its violent consequences. It is perhaps easier to imagine them, amidst their lives of desperate I-Hotel loneliness, as eternally swinging, forever single, and straight bachelors.

Such heteronormativity (and a healthy dose of Catholic prudishness) would perhaps prevent any further inquiry into whether or not scenes of the love that dare not speak its name were ever enacted in those lonely and cramped migrant shacks.**

*The whole quote actually goes, “The Filipinos are hot little rabbits, and many of these white women like them for this reason.” At which point, I imagine, my straight male Filipino students say under their breath, “Cool.”

**I’m also thinking about this because of a discussion in class last week of Joel Tan’s story “Night Sweats,” in which the classroom — and at some point one student was fanning herself just talking about it — was treated to phrases like “ring muscle” and “purple knob.”

Popularity: 2% [?]