Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2930097 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bobby Benedicto (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 25-47 |
| Publication date | 2013-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Text (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/01642472-2348977 |
| OpenAlex | W2058188958 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
This article examines the role played by “third world” queer place-making practices in the reproduction of postcolonial dreams of urban and global modernity. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manila, the Philippines, the article investigates the transformation of the Brutalist structures erected under the Marcos dictatorship into sites of transgender performance. More specifically, it examines the conversion of the Manila Film Center (1981)-a long-abandoned structure rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of entombed construction workers-into the host site for the Amazing Philippine Theater, a “drag” production marketed to tourist audiences as “the largest transvestite show in Asia.” The paper suggests that the Film Center can be read as a modern ruin: a spectral environment that elicits a lost sense of optimism and globalism, while inducing feelings of terror and dread by serving as a reminder of what awaits those who subscribe to the dictatorship’s promise of modernity. In turn, the paper reads the Amazing Philippine Theater as a queer space emergent in the ruins of modern dreams: a space that has inherited the never-to-be-completed task of becoming global and that thus enables the aspirations embodied by dictatorship architecture to have a life beyond death. By drawing links between transgender performance and the production of a third world city in “first world drag,” the paper demonstrates the relations of complicity that bind “third world” queer place-making projects to the postcolonial state’s monumentalist attempts to materialize claims of truth, beauty, order, and progress through the adoption of modern aesthetic forms
Aesthetics · Art · Dictatorship · Media studies · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Socioeconomic Development in Asia
Beyond the wall
From power to architecture
Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi
Queering Space, Designing Queerly and Outlining a Queer Approach to Space, Spatial Studies and Spatial Design Through and Beyond Matters of Performance, Representation and Aesthetics
Making visible concrete’s shadow places
Against capture
Expanding queer architectural theory
The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City
The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |