Global Divas

A lively ethnography of the global and transnational dimensions of gay identity as lived by Filipino immigrants in New York City, "Global Divas" challenges beliefs about the progressive development of a gay world and the eventual assimilation of all queer folks into gay modernity. Insisting that gay identity is not teleological but fraught with fractures and fissures, Martin Manalansan IV describes how Filipino gay immigrants, like many queers of color, are creating alternative paths to queer modernity and citizenship. In this study, he makes a compelling argument for the significance of diaspora and immigration as sites for investigating the complexities of gender, race, and sexuality. Manalansan locates diasporic, transnational, and global dimensions of gay and other queer identities within a framework of quotidian struggles ranging from everyday domesticity to public engagements with racialized and gendered images to life-threatening situations involving AIDS. He reveals the gritty, mundane, and often contradictory deeds and utterances of Filipino gay men as key elements of queer globalization and transnationalism. Through careful and sensitive analysis of these men's lives and rituals, he demonstrates that gay identity is not merely a consumable transnational product or lifestyle. It is, he explains, one pivotal element in the multiple, shifting transnational relationships queer immigrants of color mobilize in confronting the tribulations of a globalizing world.