The Sound of Queer Diaspora: Sonic Enactments of Filipinx Desire, Loss and Belonging

Casey Mecija

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto

Casey Mecija

Doctor of Philosophy

Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto

2020 Abstract

In this dissertation, I foreground Filipinx cultural production in building an aesthetic archive of transpacific aesthetic expression. From this point, I listen for its queer sounds. My research draws on queer theory, performance studies, and Filipinx diaspora studies to suggest that sound offers a methodological framework that can uniquely register modes of collectivity and desire that may otherwise go unrecognized. I also deploy psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and reparation to elaborate a definition of sound that explains its material and metaphorical force as it creates conditions for new relational possibilities. Broadly, I suggest that sound has an affective quality that capaciously allows Filipinx diasporic subjects to create forms of home, desire, and belonging that defy racialized ascriptions born from racism, colonialism, and their gendered dimensions.

This dissertation includes four chapters, each offering a critical reading of an aesthetic object.

The objects that I have assembled in this dissertation include videos that feature performances by

Filipinx children, visual art and music by Filipinx artists, and a film that expresses the queer dynamics of sound. By critically listening for queer sound as it is produced by these aesthetic objects, I hope to contribute a theory of diaspora that may otherwise be rendered unintelligible

ii iii due to hegemonies of vision, empire, and heterosexuality. Ultimately, this project seeks to expose how sonicity can inhabit the affective force of desire, loss, and belonging in queer, transpacific representation.

Acknowledgments

Dina Georgis and Robert Diaz supervised this dissertation with enthusiasm, rigorous critique and sustained attention. I feel deeply indebted to their collaborative effort to deepen my theoretical interventions while also reminding me of the importance of remaining creative and unapologetically myself in my writing. I turn to their work as researchers and to their examples of community engagement as touchstones for queer hope. Dina and Robert have exemplified a form of pedagogy I will seek to carry with me into all of my future academic, creative and community endeavors. While completing my coursework, Dina’s class Aesthetic Expression and

Radical Hope helped to shape the intellectual commitments of my research. Under her guidance,

I have been encouraged to remain creative and curious. Her writing on queer affect has been especially generative, and her ability to seamlessly blend poetics and critical theory is a model I hope to emulate. Robert has been a generous mentor, before and during my doctoral studies. I am indebted to his work on Filipinx cultural practices and turn to his scholarship as an example of how to ethically and thoughtfully write about Filipinx subjectivity. Under his supervision, I have been treated with the utmost respect and care.

Angie Fazekas, Aarzoo Singh, Henar Perales, and Lynn Ly have been valued interlocutors whose discerning comments, network of care, and energizing support lent much-needed structure and collegiality to my work. Our frequent check-ins have been reassuring and fun. Rinaldo Walcott is someone I have respected for a very long time. His presence as a committee member has been incredibly important to me, and I am honored to have been in conversation with him. Christina

Baade has supported and influenced this work since its first utterances in my M.A. Christine

Balance and Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns offer examples of how to produce feminist, Filipinx performance studies that leaves me awestruck over and over again. I thank them tremendously.

iv v

I owe much of this writing to my friends: Kieran Adams, Laurie Kang, Sean O’Neil, Miyako

Kurishi, Chase Joynt, Vivek Shraya, Immony Men, and the Filipinx arts community I was first introduced to through the Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Filipino Arts and Culture. I also thank my former Ohbijou bandmates, Anissa, Heather, Andrew, James, and Ryan, for helping to elicit queer and Filipinx sounds.

My deepest gratitude to my parents, Emma and Francisco, and to my sisters, Michelle and Jenny.

I was first introduced to the transformative possibilities of sound when my parents enrolled me in singing lessons and gave me an outlet for creative impulses. The Dyer and Fannia families have also supported my work in countless ways.

I dedicate this dissertation to Hannah Dyer and Asa Cy. The sounds that mark my words are always expressions of love for you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

Listening to Queer Diasporas ...... 9

Framing Queer Sound ...... 13

A Note on Method ...... 20

Chapter Summaries ...... 22

Chapter 1 The Queer Sonics of Childhood: Listening to Capital, Labour and “Asymmetries of Innocence” ...... 29

Balang’s Dance: Puro Arte as Queer Affect ...... 36

Puro Arte and The Child Who Acts Out ...... 38

Bulang’s “Splendid” Dancing ...... 43

Blank Space and “The Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence” ...... 49

Puro Arte and Filling Blank Spaces ...... 55

Conclusion ...... 58

Chapter 2 Queer Dissonance in Pantayo’s Kulintang ...... 62

“Come with Me:” Beyond the Sound of Multiculturalism ...... 66

The Dissonant Sounds of Pantayo ...... 72

Kulintang: The Sound of Nostalgic Return ...... 79

Conclusion ...... 85

Chapter 3 Skin as Ecstatic Surface: Hearing Diaspora in the Work of Patrick Cruz ...... 88

Auscultative Listening and Diasporic Connection ...... 94

Hearing Racialized Skin: Turning the Inside Out ...... 104

The Ecstatic Surface of Plus Ultra ...... 110

Conclusion ...... 113

vi vii

Chapter 4 Queer Affect and Modalities of Sound in Hong Khao’s Lilting ...... 116

Racialized Sound and Its Agentic Capacities ...... 120

The Sonic Frequencies of Queer Affect ...... 123

“Felt Sound” and Material Vibrations ...... 128

Conclusion ...... 134

Conclusion Sounds that Linger, Sounds that Queer in the Pandemic ...... 136

(Dis)Identification and Queer Futurity ...... 142

Works Cited ...... 146

Introduction

This dissertation theorizes sonic enactments made in and beyond Filipinx1 diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities across multiple geographic, affective, and psychic spaces. My research draws on queer theory, performance studies, and Filipino/a diaspora studies to suggest that sound offers a methodological framework that can uniquely register modes of collectivity and desire that may otherwise go unrecognized.

Here, I define sound as a material and metaphorical force that becomes a condition of relational possibility. Broadly, I suggest that sound has an affective quality that capaciously allows Filipinx diasporic subjects to create forms of home, desire, and belonging that defy racialized ascriptions born from racism, colonialism, and their gendered dimensions.

Nina Sun Eidsheim suggests that “the figure of sound is an entity whose existence depends on an objective measurement” (17). She makes clear that “the figure of sound” is a relational phenomenon that too often becomes processed as a static or seemingly knowable object constrained by its antecedent referent. That is, sound is often reduced within paradigms that seek to stabilize its meaning. For example, music is constrained by fixed understandings of genre, pitch, consumption, and duration, and these processes of ossification limit how musical sounds are perceived. I join a new swell of scholars whose work seeks out the psychic, multi-sensory and intermaterial potentials of sound in order to move away from presumptive definitions and naturalized conceptions of its function and meaning (Campt; Crawley; Eidsheim; James;

1 Recently, Filipinx has emerged as a popular term for describing people and experiences related to the Philippines. Without a gendered imperative for either male or female (i.e., Filipino or Filipina), I employ this term in my own writing. However, since much of the literature I have read and will discuss uses Filipino and/or Filipina, I do, at times, echo these terms in my writing.

1 2

Kapchan; Steinrager and Chow). My dissertation argues that when sound resists historical referents or musical parameters, it can extend into queer terrain. Sound that defies objective measurements of taste or noise can be considered queer because it holds the potential to disrupt what we know about ourselves and others. Specifically, drawing on queer theory’s challenge of dominant understandings of identity formation, I suggest that queer sound erodes presumptive interpretations of Filipinx diaspora. I use queerness to gesture to both embodiment and a psycho- social history in which Filipinx people have been rendered “always already queer” to imperial sensibilities (Mendoza 27). By considering the sonic excesses of Filipinx childhood (Chapter 1), ontologies of queer dissonance (Chapter 2), multisensory encounters with sound (Chapter 3), and queer affect and sound as symbolic conduits (Chapter 4), I explore how queer sound complicates understandings of Filipinx subjectivity and community.

Following the foundational work of Lucy Mae San Burns, Christine Bacareza Balance, and Theo

Gonsalves, which clearly explains focalized performance in Filipinx embodied subjectivity, my dissertation theorizes queer sound as that which exceeds the abjection of the Filipinx body and creates diasporic community. Here, sound is explained for its unique abilities to capture slippages between affect and the emotional conflicts of racism, homophobia, and national belonging. As I foreground the cultural practices of Filipinx people in the Philippines, the United

States, and Canada, I document an archive of diasporic performance with a particular focus on music-making that suggests sound is an affective force that becomes a condition of possibility for Filipinx people.

The notion that sound holds affective possibilities for repairing histories of loss is emphasized in

José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, where he recalls that punk music allowed him to imagine “a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where [he]

3 tried to live” (100). The sound of punk, for Muñoz, was more than music or a system of epistemological dissemination. As a “disaffected Cuban queer teen,” Muñoz’s experience of punk music and the culture that surrounded the genre shaped his ability to imagine intimacies that allowed him to get closer to queer utopian feelings and temporarily redress the material harms of homophobia and racism (100). I, too, share an intimacy with the “transportive” capacities of sound that are held in music (Kun 3). My critical motivation for situating my dissertation in predominantly Filipinx cultural production and performance emerges from the soundscapes of my queer Filipinx childhood and my early adulthood as a musician.

The listening practice and theoretical framework I describe throughout this dissertation is cultivated by and calibrated to the experience of growing up in a home filled with sounds that gestured to an elsewhere. Lintik is the Tagalog word for lightning. It is a term often used to disclose the wish for someone to be struck by lightning; thus, it is a word that connotes feelings of frustration and anger, and also malice. I have strong memories of my mother yelling “ay lintik na!” at me as a child. The words and the force with which they were communicated signaled impending discipline. I felt the sounds of these words and their affective force through the contours of their vibration, even though I did not understand their semantic meaning. My parents migrated from the Philippines to Canada in the mid-1970s. My sisters and I were raised in a small city called Brantford, in the Canadian province of Ontario. We were never taught Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines, and we were discouraged from trying to mimic its sounds so that our learning of English would not be interrupted. My parents were fearful that if we spoke their language, we might acquire accents that were, to them, explicit markers of difference.

The sound of language, coupled with the demand for its comprehension, is both a project of

4 cultural belonging and one of colonization. The “simultaneous geographies of landscape and imagination” (Nguyen and Hoskins 1) heard in my parents’ accents and in their blend of English and Tagalog (sometimes referred to as “Taglish”) point to their history of migration and sound out the imperial history of the Philippines. The “rolling R’s”2 and elongated vowels of Taglish gesture to a somewhere else that is not Canada. In the suburb in which we lived for almost two decades, my parents’ accents were a queer sound incongruent to the hegemonic demands of

Canadian nation-state.3 The sound of their accents informed the discernment of racial difference and the failure of “colonial imitation.”4 Drawing on resources from sound and performance studies, queer theory, queer diaspora studies, Filipinx studies, and psychoanalysis, I suggest a theory of “queer sound” in this dissertation that explicates how the sonic might be used as a conceptual resource for making sense of the affective and psychic lives of diasporic communities, particularly Filipinx. While theories of sound have deduced its materialities to scientific reasoning and the logics of physics, sound also leverages social relations and dynamics of power informed by race and racism (Keeling and Kun; Stoever-Ackerman).

I begin with the description of a sound from my childhood because it continues to resonate in my understanding of self, precisely because when I listen closer to memories of its force, I must confront biography, histories of race and racialization, and the psychic workings of language. For me, the sounds of Tagalog words transmit affects of diaspora, citizenship, and kinship. My

2 R. Linmark Zamora’s 1995 novel, Rolling the R’s, examines the lives of non-normative queers of colour in Hawaii. Zamora’s text importantly suggests that the use of hybrid languages is a way of recognizing the contemporary collusion of colonialism, gender, race and sex on Filipinx subjectivity. 3 See May Farrales’ 2017 research on Filipino-Canadian high school students and the challenges they face in educational attainment. The Filipino accent and English competency are cited as “a measurable indicator[s] of competency” (216). 4 See Homi Bhabba’s 1984 essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” where mimicry is positioned as a potentially subversive mechanism of colonial power.

5 parents continue to use Tagalog as the language with which they speak to one another, and their household has always been a place of gathering for relatives and family friends who use it to communicate. The sonic encounter I had as a child (and continue to have) with my parents’ language prompts me to ask: What feelings are in excess of the word that is spoken? What is the

“phonic substance” that undergirds this particular relationality? While post-structuralist accounts of language and representation have been critiqued for neglecting to attend to embodiment and emotion, the “affective turn” in critical theory signals a shift in focus to the episteme of nondiscursive meaning. Questions of affect have been centered in queer and feminist theory since the mid-2000s (Ahmed; Gregg and Seigworth). The emergence and popularity of affect theory as a field of study marked a wave of critical inquiry into the epistemological force of feelings.

While strands of musicology, ethnomusicology and sound studies have longer histories of working with situated affect as a useful conceptual outlet, I seek to blend queer and feminist theory with sound studies in order to develop a theoretical framework for describing resources of affect, sound, aurality and sensing “otherwise possibilities” (Crawley 5) of diasporic experience.

Sound studies is a useful location with which to place my project because it is inherently interdisciplinary and pulls from many different theoretical and methodological sources. Kara

Keeling and Josh Kun propose that the discipline is one of hospitality:

[It has] grown into a field hospitable to anyone interested in exploring sound’s social

meanings, cultural histories, technological evolutions, political impacts and spatial

mappings, to name only a few of the many directions being explored through this new

attention to critical aurality and the practices and performances of listening. (Keeling and

Kun 7)

The field’s hospitality has provided me with confidence to make a contribution to its current shortcomings. It is my belief that sound studies can be creatively mobilized alongside theories of

6 queer diaspora, Filipinx Studies, and psychoanalysis to consider how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions.

To this day, many people expect my Filipinx body to be able to express feelings, affects, sentences, and sounds in Tagalog. But Tagalog was something my parents thought they were protecting me from as they hoped I would easily be invited into the social fabric of Canadian schools, institutions, and friendships. For me, the sonic dimensions of Tagalog, which I feel but do not completely understand, offer an idea of the messy entanglements of sound’s material and affective capacities. The notion that sound is “a material that language uses” (Saussure 116-117) is particularly conducive to discourses of queer theory that invite anti-identitarian considerations of feeling and affect. In the specific familial recollection that I have offered, the dematerialization of language illuminates a queer mode of relating. Queerness is produced when the conditions of sound-making offer a lifeline to differently understand the sounds we take for granted. While queer theory has examined its share of sonic objects and subjects (Bonenfant;

Jennex; Royster; Woloshyn), throughout this dissertation, I theorize how the diasporic condition acts as a site of possibility to harness the queerness of sound as it relates to diaspora.

Sound, or what Fred Moten refers to as “phonic substance” (In the Break 13), poses a challenge to occularcentric interpretations of cultural production. An embrace of the aesthetic power of phonic material helps to move away from ascriptions of value so often premised on visual epistemologies. Put differently, emphasizing the substance of sound expands sensorial hierarchies that assume vision is congruous with knowledge (Campt; Eidsheim; Moten In the

Break; Stoever). Moten believes that sound can be felt in all of our perceptual experiences of the surrounding environment. For him, sound reverberates in excess of aural dimensions and helps to

7 make meaning from our aesthetic encounters with subjects and objects.5 Theorizing sound as central to social, psychic and emotional encounters forces consideration of how the sonic enunciates alternative enactments of desire, loss and belonging. The notion that sound resonates in excess of aurality gestures to its capacities to take on queer forms. The generativity of sound in my life and in my diasporic Filipinx household produced my desire to think of sound as a conduit for queer potential and possibility.

As a queer Filipinx musician, I come to this project with a vested interest in the ways that sound and performance are a mode of knowledge production and knowledge exchange. Lucy Mae San

Pablo Burns and Christine Balance provide important critiques of how the Filipinx performing body has been discursively read within tropes of mimicry and imitation. Christine Balance’s study of Filipinx music and art gives me language with which to theorize how we might

“disobediently listen” to such sounds (62). Later, I reflect on how the racialization of Filipinx performance has relied on the erasure of the powerful ways sound invokes alternative interpretations of diasporic subjectivity. Centrally, this project attempts to loosen the hold of colonial scripts that have regulated how we listen to the Filipinx performing body.

Muñoz suggests that “performance studies is framed through ‘doing’ as opposed to a more epistemological perspective – a ‘knowing’. The field of performance studies is considerably useful to me because it asks not only about content but also, form, and in doing so can also ask more about what a text does in the world, affectively, politically and materially” (“Interview with

5 In, In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition, Moten considers the “phonic materiality” of black performance and its relation to economies of value and reproduction. He importantly posits that “[B]lackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity (2). The labour of black performance is contextualized within a history of objectification and the refusal of value. Moten further addresses how the aural has been historically subordinated in relation to the visual. The history of blackness elucidates the ways in which bodies have been differently shaped by aesthetic experience.

José Muñoz”). Relatedly, this project examines what a sound can do in and for the world. My belief is that queer diasporic experience produces sounds (as well as their attendant silences) that do something, politically and materially. Posing inquiry into the structure of affective, libidinal, epistemological, and political attachments to aurality, this project listens to sounds in contemporary culture that might otherwise be rendered unintelligible or queer. In our contemporary moment, where borders structure diasporic conditions, this project imagines other ways and forms of belonging together, despite the state’s foreclosures. Rather than invest in a geo-specific project that is attached to sentiments of the nation (i.e., the United States, Canada, the Philippines), this dissertation foregrounds how sound and its excesses can produce a methodology of listening that unsettles geographic, epistemological, and ontological borders. For this reason, I discuss my parents’ migration across the Pacific and discuss the transpacific flow of affect, sound, and ideas. However, in agreement with Aimee Bahng’s ambivalence concerning the language of “transpacific,” like her, I use it to capture Filipinx people’s movement across the

Pacific while simultaneously realizing its limits when not contextualized within histories of settler-colonialism. That is, the land and water moved into, through, and over by Filipinx immigrants are “speculative spaces” that engender alternative modes of imagining futurity that defer from narratives of financialization and militarization (Bahng) but must also confront complicity in settler-colonialism. My intention here is not to negate how the transpacific becomes wrapped up in “fantasies of economic expansion and domination” (Nguyen and

Hoskins 2), but rather to emphasize how sound can differently illuminate the flow of culture, ideas and intimacies that emerge from the Philippines.

Listening to Queer Diasporas

Queer diasporas are made in what Lisa Lowe terms “the intimacies of the four continents” (20).

For Lowe, citizenship is, at its core, a transnational project that relies on a network of borders and global histories of race. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe offers her readers a

“critical genealogy” of the intimate colonial relations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas in building modern modalities of liberalism (137). For her, careful study of the history of these continental relations offers new ways of understanding the formations of political subjectivity and the teleologies of liberal success and personhood. Queer diaspora unsettles such teleologies, nationalist formations, and histories of ideological attachments to borders. As a methodology, then, queer diaspora unhinges the notion that people and things are held within the boundaries of one home. Such unsettlement is, for David Eng, a queer feeling (84). It is the construction and work of queer feeling that drives my address of how sound carries feeling across bodies, people, water, and borders.

Along with other scholars of queer theory and racialization such as Gayatri Gopinath, Martin

Manalansan, Amber Musser, and Jasbir Puar, David Eng suggests that queer diasporic methodologies insist on the displacement of nationalist sentimentalities and ideologies. He proposes that queer diaspora defies the “normative impulse to recuperate lost origins, to recapture the mother or motherland, and to valorize the dominant notions of social belonging and racial exclusion that the nation-state would seek to naturalize and legitimate through the inherited logics of kinship, blood and identity” (13-14). For Amber Musser, a queer diasporic framework considers how sensual epistemologies are constituted from the materiality of race. By positioning black and brown bodies as “excess forms of embodiment” or what she terms “brown

10 jouissance” (13),6 Musser dwells in the radical possibilities of the flesh as a technology of desire, pleasure, and pain. In Musser’s work, queer diaspora imagines the ways in which the fleshy experiences of brown and black bodies exceed representations that have been historically regulated by white supremacy. She insists that thinking queerly about diasporas generates “new possibilities for kinship” that account for slavery’s destruction of the Black nuclear family (113).

Musser’s turn to sensuality prioritizes the entanglements of the aesthetic and the flesh as epistemologies of excess. Musser’s theorizing is inspiration for many of the conjectures offered here, which aim to possess a theoretical armature that holds sound, corporeality, history, the psyche, and aesthetic possibility in intimate proximity.

Sara Ahmed has also produced formative scholarship on diasporic communities, racialized subjects, and queer nationalisms. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others,

Ahmed posits that queer people of colour navigate the world acutely attuned to their difference, and that this lived experience impacts their responses to objects and others. Combining the study of phenomenology7 and queer theory, Ahmed importantly suggests that a queer phenomenology considers how sexual orientation informs the ways that subjects orient themselves with and to objects and others.8 Ahmed theorizes “orientations” in order to pose questions about how certain bodies come to easily inhabit spaces while others are less likely to “sink in” (161). She describes

6 Musser’s theorization of brown jouissance is informed by Jacques Lacan’s formulations of jouissance. Musser uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to more closely consider the “sensations of being a body” (12). In particular, Musser highlights Nestor Braunstein’s description of jouissance as “‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure. It is a plus, a sensation that is beyond pleasure” (Musser 13). However, Musser cautions at the limitations of Lacan’s concept in engaging in issues connected to race and gender. Brown jouissance, then, accounts for how selfhood is constructed through histories of slavery and otherness by focusing on sensual excess. 7 See Husserl for his work on phenomenology, which was instrumental in the conceptualization of Ahmed’s theorizing of queer phenomenology. 8 See Ahmed’s book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, where she theorizes how emotions “shape” individual bodies.

“orientation” as the compulsion to turn to something or someone. When we recognize an object, we orient ourselves toward it; we turn toward it. Ahmed argues that a “queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way of inhabiting the world by giving ‘support’ to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place” (179). Lines of orientation create opportunities to recognize some objects while also preventing us from perceiving (and, in the case of my project, perceiving the sounds felt and emitted by) others.

Ahmed suggests that we unconsciously follow lines of orientation that are pre-established by social norms. Her arguments are especially important when considering how queer diasporic subjects orient themselves to notions of “home.” Thinking autobiographically, Ahmed writes,

“Now in living a queer life, the act of going home, or going back to the place I was brought up, has a disorienting effect” (Queer Phenomenology 11). By theorizing both psychic and embodied relations that queer subjects have to migration and heteronormativity, Ahmed brings ideas of queer desire into conversations with ideas of family, settlement, and racism. She describes migration as a “process of disorientation and reorientation: as bodies ‘move away’ as well as

‘arrive’, as they reinhabit spaces” (9). In thinking with Ahmed, I wonder how my own queer life has a disorienting effect on my memories of the sound of my mother’s voice as it resonated affect in my childhood home. Thus, this project posits that sound holds that capacity to both disorient and reorient diasporic subjects to a “sense of home” (10). It is through the sonification of queer diaspora, as a “disorientation and reorientation” to a “sense of home,” that this project anchors its analysis. Thinking with the “disorientation and reorientation” that sound registers assists me in proposing a theory for how the sound of queer diaspora is materialized and felt.

In Queer Returns, Rinaldo Walcott discusses the difficulties of remaking ‘home’ in multiple locations. He employs Ahmed’s theory of queer orientations to describe how his relationship to

12 queerness in the diaspora is impacted by travels to his ‘homeland’. Walcott writes, “[Ahmed’s] insights on phenomenological experiences in terms of queer orientations help me to problematize how returns home inform my practices and politics of queerness in the diaspora” (133). For

Walcott, this queer orientation to diasporic subjectivity renders Blackness ‘odd’ in relation to the demands of the state, particularly the political promises of multiculturalism. Walcott interrogates

Black queer diasporic orientations to home and the “ethical responsibilities and dilemmas of diaspora subjects” addressing home from elsewhere (134). For him, Black queer diaspora is a

“typology of desire as opposed to an empirical reality” (186). He thus locates diasporic aesthetic production as a site that animates queer relations and queer bodies in order to problematize

“regimes of belonging” (121).

Walcott asserts that Black people are often in excess or queer to definitions of what it means to be human, and thus, he proposes, rethinking the conditions of being human from a site of Black dispossession can open up new ontological and epistemological ways of relating. Put another way, the centering of Black people and Black expression causes one to recognize the complexity of blackness as historical category of relation. Walcott carves out theoretical terrain with which to consider how Black people have aesthetically contributed to imagining a “different kind of future” (Queer Returns 236). Beyond the foundational narratives of Black subjectivity that assume states of impoverishment, violence and heterosexuality, he posits that art can “unleash different kinds of representation” (82). As others have argued, Black aesthetics bring the histories of colonialism, enslavement and migration into the present in unruly and queer ways

(Sharpe; Allen). Walcott’s text provides a theoretical framework with which to consider the

“contradictory inheritances” of queer subjectivity as related to sexuality, racialization, and formations of kinship and community (146). In thinking about the space and place of the “black

Atlantic” (Gilroy)9 in queer diaspora studies, new contexts for justice and accountability are opened-up.

My analysis of the queerness of sound is deeply indebted to the work of Black Studies scholars such as Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo

Walcott, who have each demonstrated how Black aesthetics have animated crucial modes of collective belonging. In vital alliance with other racialized, queer, and marginalized lives, their work foregrounds the potential of aesthetics to resignify the abject figure as forgetive of better futures. As Walcott explains, “diasporic sensibilities are intimately engaged in processes of destabilization that are meant to produce a different view of the world and therefore a different aesthetic” (Queer Returns 20). Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. has notably written about the complex relationship between Filipinx youth culture and Black aesthetics amidst specters of racial violence in the U.S.

Framing Queer Sound

The archive I have assembled includes examples of queer sound that may not immediately align with traditional classifications “queer” or “sound,” but that detail queer significations which shift our sonologic perspectives of Filipinx and transpacific imaginaries. Kara Keeling reflects on the temporal and spatial logics of queerness:

‘Queer’ is not an ontological category – it is not what one is; rather, it is an

epistemological category – one that involves life and death questions of apprehension and

value production. ‘Queer’ involves how one signifies and how groups of living beings are

9 Paul Gilroy coined the term black Atlantic in reference to the Black African Diaspora that began in the 16th century with the transatlantic slave trade. The forcible removal of West Africans from their homelands to the New World resulted in a multitude of African diasporas. The black Atlantic forged an opportunity to study new cultural iterations in what was termed the “modern” world.

made to signify within a given set of significations. It may include what one does, how

one does it, and where those actions place one in relationship to the maintenance of the

present organization of things, including the groupings and affiliations of living beings

constitutive of social, political, and economic relations. (17)

Keeling recognizes the contradictory impulses of queer as an “imposition but…[also] a becoming” (18). Queerness is perceptible through structures of gender, race, and sexuality, but it is also in excess of sociality and manageability. It is a concept that is often domesticated to the demands of capital and state-governed institutions like gay marriage and the family, but it remains useful beyond their measures. Martin Manalansan offers “queer” as a rubric with which to theorize “cultural dissonance” that Filipinx immigrants may “experience with identity categories and cultural practices” (“Migrancy, Modernity, Mobility” 146). In this dissertation, queerness is used as a methodological philosophy that seeks out and studies the unpredictable and sometimes unintelligible ways we find belonging and solidarity. Relatedly, sound is understood as vibrations that shape corporeal sensations (Campt; Eidsheim; Kheshti) and elicit new formations of self and community.

There has been a recent turn in sound studies and musicology that values sound as a corporeal sensation that carries cultural implications (Goodman; Henriques). One of my interventions into the field of sound studies is to question how methods of listening that privilege sensation might provide a compelling inquiry into the multi-sited movements and desires of Filipinx people.

While recognizing that “Asianness” is too large a category of identification to hold onto for the purposes of this project, and in an attempt to satisfy my own embodied inquiries into subject formation, I am specifically interested in how the affective and psychic life of sounds made in the Filipinx diaspora possess a felt, queer frequency.

In Metroimperial Intimacies, Victor Mendoza demonstrates how ascriptions of queerness share a legacy with “imperialism’s racializing discourse” in the context of the U.S. occupation of the

Philippines (29). Mendoza suggests that Filipinx subjects were always already regarded as

“queer” to the U.S. imperial project, and that to summon the term in relation to Philippine subjectivity runs the risk of reproducing its imperial significations. That is, the Philippines was constituted as queer in order to assert the normalcy of the U.S. He believes that making notice of this relation to imperial relation requires a deprivileging of gender and sexual variance as a primary identifier, making room for the recognition of processes of racialization (Mendoza 28).

Robert Diaz further expands on the importance of locating historical specificity when imagining

Filipinx subjectivity in relation to queerness. He argues for the examination of new archives of

Filipinx queer experience that are constantly reproduced by shifting local and global contexts.

While Diaz agrees that histories of imperialism undoubtedly leave an impression on contemporary Filipinx subjectivities, he finds hope and method by combing through the archives of the present in order to imagine something new that can explain their uniqueness. Diaz suggests that “[q]ueerness is a tactic for animating aesthetic practices and performances of world-making that insist our ‘now’ is not necessarily ‘future’” (345). His queer inquiry into

Filipinx experience questions how the debris from the past can be aesthetically reactivated to create a more humane and just world. Inspired by Diaz, I use queerness as a method that creates new iterations of racial difference and turn to the realm of sound as a future-making project. This dissertation offers a theoretical framework to locate hope in relation to aurality, and to forge a method for studying the affective registers of sound itself.

As I have been suggesting, sounds that are charged with affects that resonate in excess of referent and syntax disclose the queerness of sound. The oscillating tones of my mother’s voice

16 as she spoke a blend of English and Tagalog, and my affective reading of this sonic encounter, insist on the potential for sound to illicit queer feelings of difference. For Ashon Crawley, queer sound “disrupts the everyday ordinariness and quotidian qualities of life, compelling imagination into otherwise possibilities for relation” (“Queer Sound”). Crawley conceptualizes queer sound in response to an open letter published by jazz pianist Fred Hersch, where he repudiates the use of the term queer in an event called OutBeat: America’s First Queer Jazz

Festival. Scheduled to appear as a headliner, Hersch was concerned about the conflation of his sexual identity and music practice, insisting that he did not perform “gay jazz.” In response,

Crawley suggests that sound destabilizes what we think we might know about social constructions of identity. Sound has the potential to force confrontation with affects that might undo or queer us. Crawley argues that the substance of queer sound is “found in its *capacity* to queer us, to make us live in manifold capacities, into the exorbitant possibilities that are ever before us” (“Queer Sound”); queer sound illuminates the excesses of identity. He writes, “Queer sound is about the opening of oneself to pleasure however it may come, the openness to movement and vibration, and allowing such vibration and movement to work on you, on your relation to others, on your relation to the world” (Crawley, “Queer Sound”).

Queer sound is estranged from the certitude of an origin and thus harnesses new potential for social intimacies and ontological categories of knowability. Crawley proposes, “queer sound is that which does not seek validation from rules, habits, and custom, but seeks out new modalities for relationality” (“Queer Sound”). Thus, Crawley posits that queer sound is the effect of sound’s capacity to displace identification.

Theoretically and conceptually, my project is also inspired by the ways that I have been queered by sound and how my queerness is enunciated in sound. The unpredictable cadences of my voice

17 when I am singing, the clattering of an empty venue after a musical performance, reverberations a classroom in which I lecture, and the transient breaths that sometimes tumble out of bodies from the bedroom I share with my partner are sonicities that provoke new psychic and material relationalities. Paying attention to these sounds for their felt sensations is more than music or a system of epistemological dissemination. Tina Campt suggests that “[s]ound can be both listened to, and in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt, it touches and moves people” (6). Reflecting on the corporeal dimensions of hearing, Roshanak Kheshti argues that “sound is experienced

(felt) by the whole body intertwining what is heard by ears with what is felt on the flesh, tasted on the tongue, and imagined in the psyche” (“Touching Listening” 713-714). I am not interested in delineating or restricting what counts as sound but in broadening its definition so that we can be primed to feel it and the psycho-social conditions that allow us to be queered by it.

In The Better Story: Queer Affect from the Middle East, Dina Georgis explains that queerness has to do with affects’ capacity to hold knowledge that is not yet processed or available to us.

She suggests that for post-colonial subjects “there are no easy ways to map selfhood” (xi).

Georgis explains queerness as enigmatic excess that disturbs our ability to know ourselves. For her, queerness is not all that holds us together, but that which pulls us apart. Queerness is a forceful identity-status that is said to produce ‘pride’ in those that come-out, but Georgis is more interested in that which has been lost and needs to be mourned. Like a number of other queer theorists (Eng; Love; Halberstam; Muñoz; Nyong’o), Georgis is skeptical of the rush to “get over” histories of violence and loss. As she shows, with the help of psychoanalysis, it can, of course, “get better,” but getting better may not simply mean getting over it.

Georgis suggests that difference – which causes war, violence, and unbearable desires to feel secure and belong – surfaces in disavowed affect, which she deems queer. She describes queer

18 affect as emotions that are attached to unconscious knowledge that have the potential to undo us

(Story 15). She explains that “[q]ueer affects are our unrecognizable desires, in excess of what we think we want and think we care about, or in excess of the things we normally would find disgusting” (15). Georgis argues that while the social expects us to abject queer affect, the aesthetic holds space for it. There is no easy way to understand how psychic suffering is socially elaborated, but her analysis helps us to make sense of how affective expressions of grief fall outside of “accepted requisites of political resistance” (50). In Chapter 4, specifically, I think with Georgis’ notion of queer affect to elaborate a diasporic sound of intimacy along the nexus of race and sexuality.

Thinking alongside Crawley (“Queer Sound”) and Georgis (Story), this dissertation attempts to examine the creative potentials of queer sound; not only as an epistemological terrain striven towards unmooring that which is predictable or teleological, but also for its potential to symbolize “the affect of difficult experience” (Georgis, Story 70). Queer sound is, then, both a material and affective register that carries the capacity for feeling something other than normalcy. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that sound holds the potential to communicate queer affect. Sonic expression, I argue, is a site where we can examine diasporic subjectivity and its queer feelings, as it offers an opportunity for “reparation and resignification” (Georgis, Story

89). From reparation and its psychic processes, as Eve Sedgwick illuminates, one can build hope.

The work offered here in this dissertation examines how sound generates new articulations of diasporic experience and how the queerness of sound itself becomes a site for a particular type of projection of diasporic hope.

Within the field of sound studies, hearing and listening are sometimes conflated and treated as interchangeable. In this project, they are distinct. While hearing is commonly understood to be a

19 passive engagement with sound, listening has been described as a deliberate act that “is an interpretive, socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations” (Stoever 14). In this way, hearing and listening are co-implicated in the intimate and ethical encountering of sound. Jennifer Lynn

Stoever has suggested that sound provides a framework from which to examine social relations enmeshed in histories of racialized subject formation. It is for this reason – the racializing of sound and the sound of race – that I stress its ability to reveal the sonic remainders of geopolitical histories informed by regimes of race, gender, and sexuality. This dissertation argues that as methodology, listening to queer diaspora provides an opportunity to consider the affective registers that enunciate otherwise understandings of migration, home, and belonging.

I have been inspired by Campt’s writing on “quotidian audibility,” from which she procures perspective into the practice of listening as an attunement to the sonic possibilities of affect.

Campt argues that sound possesses the potential to touch people and provoke feelings in powerful ways. Her insistence that sound must be theorized as a haptic form shares an alliance with Moten’s striking meditation that “sounds gives us back the visuality that occularcentrism repressed” (In the Break 235). Moten’s proposition that sound exists in the visual realm interrogates how aural and visual signifiers are co-implicated in the legacy of the visual regime of perception that has structured the interpretation of value through visual consumption. In

Chapter 3, I address this co-implication through a study of the sound of a painting. Both Campt’s and Moten’s uses of multisensory methods allow for a consideration of the generative space of affect and the multiplicity of senses that resonate through sonic expression.

Before offering a note on method and providing chapter summaries, I outline a set of questions that drive their cumulative function. These questions are not necessarily resolved, but they

20 beholden me to my archive and help orient me to the aesthetic objects I present as useful: What is the affective and psychic life of sounds made in the Filipinx diaspora? How do the psychic workings of the drives, libidinal energies, repressed memories, and displaced attachments impact what is heard in music and felt in its performance? How does the aural open up multi-sensorial or “multimodal” (Ceraso 103) understandings of queer diasporic experience? How do transnational, specifically transpacific, flows of people, objects, phenomenon, and events alter how sound is perceived? How does an accent (an aural trace of otherness) impact what is heard?

How does sound create the conditions for surveillance of marginalized bodies, and how might these phonic traces open up conversations about the impacts of globalization? In between sounds, what is felt in silence? And what sounds push beyond linguistic understanding to help imagine, constitute, or contest gender, race and sexuality differently?

A Note on Method

In this dissertation, I first build an archive that foregrounds Filipinx cultural production and other examples of transpacific aesthetic expression, and then I listen for its queer sounds. Generally, my methods are recognizable to the fields of cultural studies and performance studies. Christine

Balance’s book Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America is groundbreaking in its theorizing of the social conditions that dictate how the Filipinx performing body is consumed. Balance argues for a method of “disobedient listening” that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation by keeping one’s ear open to hidden and distant places not of this world” (5). Balance’s method of “disobedient listening” helps me to work rigorously and ethically with my archive, all the while undermining dominant discourses that confine stable understandings of what Filipinx aesthetic work should look and sound like, or how it should be performed.

Inspired by Balance’s method, this project extends her practice into the territory of auscultative listening, which also has the ability to account for libidinal economies of sound. One focus of such listening will be on skin as both a psychic border and a container for bodily sounds. In the field of sound studies, research has been done on auscultation as a listening practice (Harris;

Sterne, Rice). When one uses a stethoscope to listen to the body, they are engaging in auscultation. Put clearly, “auscultation” is the act of listening to the inside of a body. Used as a method of amplifying the quiet sounds of the body, like the heart, auscultation “involve[s] a close interplay between the senses … requir[ing] close tactile and visual contact between doctor and patient (listener and listened-to)” (Rice, “Hearing” 106). The contact between the technology of listening (stethoscope) and the skin of the patient “produce[s] an intimate, personal, and humane … interaction” (106). The uses of auscultation implicate the relationship between flesh and interiority in the production of sonic epistemologies; one must listen intently to the timbres of the body in order to formulate a diagnosis. Auscultation is evidence of how the body is a conduit of sound that both receives and emits its frequencies. Marco Donnarumma writes,

“[a]uscultation shows how sound originates within the body, traverses the organs and emerges on the outside. But sound also moves in the opposite direction: from the outside it traverses body organs and reaches the cavities and fluids composing our inner body” (20).

I turn to auscultation as an ethical method of interacting with racialized skin, which allows that which produces sound to be recognized as a container of both psychic and social materials that can move us to feel something new about Filipinx diasporic experience. The texts I have assembled in this dissertation are videos that feature performances by Filipinx children, visual art and music by Filipinx artists, and films that carry the dynamics of sound in unpredictable forms and functions. By critically listening for queer sound produced by these aesthetic texts, I hope to contribute to a reading of diaspora that may be rendered unintelligible through the hegemony of

22 vision. This project takes these texts into new terrain by using methods of queer diaspora, sound studies, and psychoanalysis to expose how sonic epistemologies inhabit affects of desire, loss and belonging that might otherwise be considered unrepresentable.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1, “Listening to the Queer Sonics of Filipinx Childhood: Queer Affect and the

Transmission of Transnational Kinships,” suggests that by critically listening to the performances of Filipinx children, we can grasp at colonial histories of race, bio-power, social constructions of childhood, and the “asymmetries of childhood innocence” (Dyer 2-3). I offer readings of two performances by Filipinx children: a child named Balang’s dance performance on the popular television show The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and the performance of a song by an unnamed girl in a YouTube video entitled “Kanta ng isang Anak para sa kanyang inang OFW

‘Blank Space’” (“Song of a child for her overseas foreign worker mother”). These videos, I propose, assist in addressing the “unsayable truths” that surface when we expand our practice of listening beyond visual registers to hear the violence of empire (Campt 45). Here, I consider what the children’s performances do to affirm, rupture, or adjust expectations of the Filipinx performing body. I ask: What political meanings can be found in the ways these children move, sing, and hold the gaze of their audience? How might their performances create queer sounds that interrupt a fraught history of globalization, infantilization, and transpacific relations? How does sound impact how children form a sense of belonging while negotiating transnational circuits of labour and family separation?

Coined by William H. Taft, the first civil governor-general and later U.S. president, the phrase

“little brown brother” was widely used to represent Filipinos within dominant American imperial imaginaries. Gideon Lasco writes, “[t]he ‘brother’ at the end of the phrase signified familial

23 affinity, but one already preceded by asymmetry: More than a description of color, ‘brown’ was a classificatory gesture that located Filipinos in a racial hierarchy that placed ‘whites’ on top”

(381). The application of child-like qualities onto Filipinx people was further mobilized to bolster colonial civilizing missions. In this first chapter, I argue that it is precisely through the trope of the Filipino as a “little brown brother” that these performances by Filipinx children hold a particularly queer valence.10

Underscoring my ideas in this chapter is the work of critical childhood theorists Kathryn Bond

Stockton, Erica Meiners, and Hannah Dyer, who collectively insist that queer theory helps to interrupt teleologies of childhood development that are used to construct and protect normative childhoods. Dyer argues that “[q]ueerness ruptures assumptions about the child’s future and undoes anticipated congruency…queerness [is also] a means to reference the capacity for creative living…that denotes something new, beyond what has been imagined” (15). I read the childhoods conveyed in both texts as queer because the sonic frequencies of their performances push us to consider the “asymmetrical value of innocence” (Dyer 2-3) placed on children from the Global South. In this chapter, and in Chapter 4, Dina Georgis’ work on queer affect also provides me with a theoretical framework with which to describe the affective modalities of sound and performance. Chapter 1 is also interested in the ways that singing and dancing give expression to queer affect, and it inquires into the enigmatic agency that is in excess of audibility. In addition, I turn to Lucy Mae San Burns’ theory of puro arte in order to describe the affective engagements that symbolize all the ways Filipinx children come to know and learn the world through sound.

10 See Gideon Lasco’s article “‘Little Brown Brothers’: Height and the Philippine-American Colonial Encounter (1898–1946),” in which he details a history of how Filipinos have been historically problematized as “little” or “short” in relation to “tall” Americans.

Chapter 2, “Queer Dissonance in Pantayo’s Kulintang,” continues to discuss how the queerness of sound is harnessed through Filipinx aesthetic expression. In this chapter, I suggest that while perceptions of sonic dissonance largely infer affects of discomfort and displeasure, the music and performance of Filipinx band Pantayo reorients our listening and apprehension of Filipinx diaspora. In thinking about the music of Pantayo, I extend the discussion from Chapter 1 about how the queerness of sound elaborates resistances to hierarchal structures that insist some lives are more valuable than others. Chapter 2 deepens analysis of how the production of sound and performance offers another mode of relating to racialized histories that mark Filipinx performing bodies as displaced mimesis. I develop a critical method for interpreting dissonance in Pantayo’s music production and performance, one which registers a modality of queerness that provides respite from the pressures of multiculturalism as it seeks to harness the consumption of music made in Canada.

In Chapter 2, I offer a brief survey of literature that theorizes dissonance from a psychoacoustic perspective. In Western music, the practical renderings of dissonance refer to disharmony or the rubbing of musical notes. The distinction of dissonance relies on the social construction of consonance, which is conventionally perceived as the resolve of notes as concomitant of pleasure satisfaction and popularity. One question hangs over this chapter: How might dissonance be mapped onto the breakdown of the authorial norms of whiteness, heterosexuality, or normativity? By writing against the “tonal laws” of Western music, I argue that Pantayo produces queer sound that resists consonance in order to imagine other modes of harmony and racialized belonging.

By examining the history of kulintang music in the Philippines and its emergence in

North America, specifically in Toronto, Canada, I also suggest that this transpacific exchange

25 encourages productive thinking about feminist collectivity, issues of Indigeneity, and the politics of representation. If dissonant sounds are often understood as “wrong” or “out of place,” I make note of how dissonance is uniquely queer and diasporic. Relatedly, my theorizing of diaspora recognizes how diasporic aesthetic production is a site that animates queer relations and queer bodies in order to problematize affective and psychic regimes of belonging.

Chapters 3 and 4 move more firmly into the territory of psychoanalytic critique. Chapter 3, “Skin as Ecstatic Surface: Listening to Diaspora in the Works of Patrick Cruz,” locates queer sound in visual art, specifically, painting. In this chapter, I explore the work of Filipinx artist Patrick Cruz for its aesthetic contribution to a discussion about diaspora, migration, and the politics of encountering art. Since visual logics have historically mediated the meanings ascribed to artwork, I recalibrate dialogue by insisting on the psychic and sonic dimensions of Cruz’s paintings. Michelle Hilmes discusses the relationship between the aural and the visual:

sound itself [is] constantly subjugated to the primacy of the visual, associated with

emotion and subjectivity as against the objectivity and rationality of vision, seen as

somehow more ‘natural’ and less constructed as a mode of communication – in essence,

fundamentally secondary to our relationship to the world and to dominant ways of

understanding it. (249)

This chapter aims to rescript the dominant use of visual metaphors in order to queer how sound is perceived in the visual realm. While appraisals of sound have historically bestowed it with an exceptional sensibility, but not necessarily made explicit linkages to its relation to the aesthetic expressions contained in painting, this chapter hopes to engender a new sensorial encounter between the impressions made by both at once. Specifically, I will ask what a painting that renders Filipinx diaspora can sound and feel like. In my analysis, sound contributes to the construction of visual meanings and offers its own unique set of cultural associations.

By examining two works by Patrick Cruz, Time Allergy and Plus Extra, I suggest that Cruz culls dominant narratives about brownness as “excessive – too loud, too bold, too much” (Burns 134) in order to offer a complex multisensorial perspective on Filipinx diasporic experience and its many expressions. I inquire into the sounds and feelings of Filipinx diaspora that are contained and induced by Cruz’s artistic practice. In attempting to push at the discursive limits of sound, I expand the frame of visual exception to include phonic substance as conceptual and political terrain. I craft an argument that suggests Patrick Cruz creates work that is alive and full of sounds that express diasporic memories of the Philippines. I make my case by likening the canvas to the primal resonant surface, the skin. With a special focus on the significance of skin, theoretical observations are drawn from psychoanalysis, sound studies, and post-colonial theory to imagine what a painting sounds like.

Chapter 4, “Queer Affect and Modalities of Sound in Hong Khao’s Lilting,” offers a reading of the aporetic space of silence and its relation to diaspora.11 This chapter considers Hong Khaou’s

2014 film, Lilting, for its aesthetic treatment of queer desire. While my inclusion of Hong

Khaou’s film steps outside of the boundaries of Filipinx-specific narratives, it fits here for its

11 I will note that this chapter was intended to also discuss Diane Paragas’ important film Yellow Rose, which is about a young Filipina who makes country music. I was able to watch Yellow Rose in the fall of 2019 at a special screening hosted by Toronto’s Reel Asian Film Festival. Sadly, due to COVID-19, the further circulation of the film has been delayed and its cinematic release in international cinemas has also been delayed. Despite attempts to access the film from the filmmaker and producers, I have been unable to watch it again, and thus, I have not been able to carefully analyze its themes, speech, and sounds. In the future, I hope to explain why my theoretical framework and methodology is useful in describing the film’s contribution to Filipinx cultural production. I will make the argument that Yellow Rose (2019), like Lilting, demonstrates that silence works to illuminate the social scripts of diasporic family and kinship relations. The film’s protagonist is an adolescent living in Austin, Texas, with her mother, who is working at a motel as a housekeeper. Neither mother nor child is recognized as U.S. citizen, and thus they belong to a large community of Filipinx subjects who labour in the diaspora. Because she is undocumented, the protagonist is faced with the pressures of another form of silence and secrecy. I would include this film in my aesthetic archive because the protagonist is an aspiring country singer who plays at the limits of race, genre, and geography.

27 rendering of transpacific history, and it very much reminds me of my Filipinx relationship to parentage, language, homophobia, and racialization. Indeed, in the tender relationship forged between an Asian mother and her child’s white lover, I feel the resonance of my own life. Lilting tells the story of how a relationship is formed between a mother whose grown son has recently died and the son’s lover, neither of whom speak the same language. Attempting to grieve their loss together requires listening to each other’s voice, despite a lack of shared language. Applying psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious to the question of how a subject listens to another’s grief beyond the confines of language, this chapter offers a theory of mourning that is attentive to the psychic mechanisms of silence. The mother, who has lost her child, re-makes a relationship to herself and the dead by learning to symbolize grief beyond the boundaries of speech. Both the mother and her son’s partner deal with the unimaginable contours and pains of death in their own ways, often meeting each other in silences, abbreviated thoughts, and frustration over the difficulty of locating mutually recognizable words. With Lilting, I think about what meanings can be made from the discursive gaps in communication.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud makes a correlation between silence and the death drive. Freud argues that “[t]he death drive instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively”

(Pleasure 338). He goes on to argue that the drive towards life and the desire to survive is fueled by Eros. This dialectic is emboldened by its sonic distinctions. Freud writes, “[t]he death instincts are by their nature mute … the clamour of life for the most part from Eros”

(“Mourning” 387). I am interested in how the sonic tensions between the silence of the death drive and Eros are filled with sound. In this final chapter, I inquire into the sonic possibilities of silence in Lilting as not a drive towards death but a modality of quiet that instead opens up options that gesture towards repair. Campt’s work on “quiet” is inflected into my analysis of the film, as her research provides a template for thinking about the generative space of

28 imperceptibility. Her work cautions against the conflation of silence and quiet, as “quiet registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention” (6). I propose that the silences between the mother and her son’s lover resonate with quiet frequencies, creating an invitation to listen to the psychic and haptic vocabularies of grief. This chapter reflects on what King-Kok

Cheung describes as “enabling silences” (20) and suggests the silences and sounds in both films actively forge new familial and cross-cultural relations and intimacies.

Chapter 1 The Queer Sonics of Childhood: Listening to Capital, Labour and “Asymmetries of Innocence”

“I believe that how we think about sound matters, and that reducing a dynamic

and multisensory phenomenon to a static, monodimensional one has ramifications

beyond our use of the concept and metaphor of the figure of sound…if we

reduce and limit the world we inhabit, we reduce and limit ourselves.”

(Nina Sun Eidsheim 3)

In The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons, Enrique de la

Cruz, Abraham Ignacio, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio present an archive of political cartoons that document the American occupation and subsequent imperial war in the Philippines.

The book includes a comprehensive collection of images that is at once compelling and violent to experience. For example, a cartoon titled “The Filipino’s First Bath” (1899) depicts U.S.

President William McKinley standing in a shallow body of water, cradling a weeping Filipinx child. The child is yielding a spear and is presumably from an Indigenous tribe in the Philippines.

The word “civilization” appears in the water ripples around McKinley’s submerged legs.

McKinley is holding a scrub brush that is etched with the word “education,” and a towel is draped over his shoulder. A caption below the image title reads, “McKinley – ‘Oh, you dirty boy!’” McKinley prepares to scrub the distraught child while Filipinx onlookers smile and appear to be dressing themselves in the American flag. This image depicts the violent civilizing project of the American occupation of the Philippines and its relation to discourses of childhood.

McKinley is tasked with washing “clean” the “naked savage boy” with the water of American education and civility (de la Cruz et al. 65). The smiling onlookers have successfully assimilated,

29 30 wearing new outfits that are labeled “Cuba” and “Puerto Rico.” In 1898, the Philippines joined these countries on the list of prospective American colonies.

Refracted through American histories of Black enslavement and Indigenous genocide, this image contains a lexicon of racialized imagery set on a global stage. McKinley is positioned as the

“benevolent” leader, cleansing the Filipinx child of their savagery and bestowing American education as a pathway to enlightenment and respectability. Racist stereotypes of Blackness and

Indigeneity that were in circulation in the U.S. were scripted onto Filipinx people and used as justification for their treatment during the American occupation of the Philippines. A cursory examination of the political cartoons represented by The Forbidden Book, which were drawn and circulated during the Philippine-American colonial encounter (1898-1946), show they often characterized Filipinx people as childlike. These images and their discursive workings offer social and political commentary on the structuring logics of American imperialism. The Filipinx subject is presumed infantile and therefore uncivilized and in need of guidance.12 The image of the unruly Filipinx child is represented alongside a towering paternal, white presence. The signification of this racial hierarchy was further impressed into popular opinion by the remarks of U.S. Governor General William Taft, who famously conceived of Filipinos as America’s

“little brown brothers.” In this chapter, I am particularly interested in the intimacies between conceptions of childhood and Filipinx colonial encounters. Indeed, political cartoons like “The

12 For a thorough discussion of how the trope of the “Little Brown Brother” leveraged scientific racism and an attention to being “short” or “little” as a racialized problem, see Gideon Lasco’s “‘Little Brown Brothers’: Height and the Philippine-American Colonial Encounter (1898–1946).” In it, Lasco writes, “Physical anthropology gave quantitative form to these differences, and photography allowed their visual representation to be transported to the West. Together, these representational practices as well as actual height differences between the colonizer and colonized led to the view that Filipinos are ‘short’ and ‘little’” (377). Here, I am interested in the tethering of height, and, in particular, the comparative framework that measures “little” Filipino bodies against “tall” American counterparts, to the corporeal dimensions of the Philippine-American encounter.

Filipino’s First Bath” convey limited understandings of Filipinx subjecthood, but I would also argue that the figure of the child in this image stands in for the Filipinx adult. To be clear, I suggest that the subjectivity of the Filipinx child is erased from the scene. The historical infantilization of the Filipinx adult has left little room to consider the subjecthood and agency of the Filipinx child. In this chapter, I focus on the sounds and performances of Filipinx children as modalities that undermine the hetero-patriarchal production of childhood in the name of

American colonization. In line with my dissertation’s desire to posit the sonicity of relationality,

I further assert that it is through the historical trope of the “little brown brother” that sounds and performances by Filipinx children hold queer possibilities.

In Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, Christine Bacareza Balance employs a theory of listening to Filipino performance that undermines racialized preconceptions of how Filipinx people are observed and assumed to perform. She offers “disobedient listening” as a methodological intervention that listens against oversimplified tropes of Filipino performance as a by-product of Western imperialism:

Disobedient listening disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation by keeping one’s

ears open to hidden and distant places not of this world. Practices of disobedient listening

rehearse other types of politics and affiliations than those merely based on the promises

and demands of visibility. Instead, it is a method that turns to the sonic and musical not

just as replacements for a cultural logic of racial visibility but instead as a way to amplify

discourse’s limits and demands. (5)

Balance centers sound and performance as a framework for rethinking how Filipinx people contest what Robert Diaz calls the “assimilationary ruse” of neoliberal logics of value (118).

While Filipinx performers in the Philippines and throughout the diaspora remain entangled in an entertainment industry largely shaped by American influence, Balance insists that the

32 performance of music serves as an artistic process that can upend the burdens of representation and insistences on cultural authenticity. In hopes of recouping sound and performance as sites that reimagine racialized imaginings of Filipinx performers, Balance reminds us that

“disobedient listening” requires attending to the “improvisatory and unscripted qualities” of sound and sensation (55). Without eliding the dense colonial history of the Philippines and its impact on race and racial formation, Balance reroutes teleological tropes in order to leave space for the social, psychic, and emotional expressions of Filipinx subjectivity.

I invoke Balance here to help contextualize my “disobedient” readings of two contemporary performances by Filipinx children. This chapter works with theories of sound, studies of childhood, and psychoanalysis to analyze two online videos where Filipinx children elicit the affective life of sound and performance. Both videos raise questions around genealogies of

Filipinx performance and its connection to circuits of transnational labour while highlighting what Hannah Dyer calls the “asymmetries of childhood innocence” (2-3) which helps to describe the uneven distribution of care to children from the Global South. Focusing on how dancing and singing registers affectively, I offer a method with which to interpret how these performances symbolically elaborate desire, belonging and loss on multiple psychic planes. Throughout this dissertation, I suggest that an attunement to the sensations and affective remainders of sound helps to enliven understandings of migration, diaspora, and the conditions of belonging for

Filipinx people. I am interested in these videos because they offer performances that are arguably queer while evidencing the multi-layered affects that surface from experiences of racial difference and familial separation that are common for Filipinx communities.

“Balang’s US Debut” (“Balang”) and “Kanta ng isang Anak para sa kanyang inang OFW ‘Blank

Space’” (“OFW Blank Space”) are online videos that present reinterpretations of American pop

33 songs by Filipinx children living in the Philippines. “Balang” features John Philip Bughaw performing a lip-sync and dance to a song entitled “Bang Bang” on the popular American television show The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “OFW Blank Space” takes place in an Internet café in an undisclosed location in the Philippines. In this video, an unnamed child sings the song

“Blank Space” by American pop artist Taylor Swift to her mother, who is watching from a computer in another country. Though very different settings, both videos prompt inquiry into the social constructions of Filipinx childhood. Specifically, they present an opportunity for the viewer to witness children express the multiplicity of their experiences in ways that are not wholly socially processed. By tuning into the affective traces of their performances, audiences are confronted with the unpredictable and improvisational qualities of singing and dancing. The queer affect they emit holds information that tests the limits of dominant discourses that continue to racialize Filipinx performers within imperial sensibilities.

This chapter argues that what remains peripheral to the tropes that render Filipinx performers legible to others are forms of pleasure and agency that exceed identity politics.13 While it could be argued that the use of American pop music interpellates these children as being submissive to histories of colonial and racial subjugation, I suggest that the restaging of pop music allows for

“alternative modes of proximity” (See 32) to these histories. The colonial conditions of possibility that mark the children’s performances are inescapably present. However, I turn to these videos to consider how sound and performance index enactments that are in excess of

13 Some examples of how Filipinx people return the colonial gaze through performance are Christine Balance’s, How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance, Broderick Chow’s, Feeling in Counterpoint: Complicit Spectatorship and the Filipino Performing Body, Theodore Gonsalves’, The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora, J. Lorenzo Perillio’s, “If I was not in prison, I would not be famous”: Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines, and Karen Tongson’s Empty Orchestra: The Karaoke Standard and Pop Celebrity.

34 racialized scripts while also recognizing that the shadow of empire cannot be elided. Both videos showcase children whose performances are forgetive and expressive of emotions in both worded and unworded terrains. Dancing and singing are sites where affects are represented and elide the demands of language. I theorize the affective excess of each performance and argue that it elucidates intimacies between empire, performance, race, and gender. I am particularly interested in the unplanned bodily interventions in each performance and locate queerness in the movements and vocalizations that are before meaning or are yet to be processed within semiotic frames.

I read “Balang” and “OFW Blank Space” through the work of Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, who uses the concept of puro arte as a framework to describe the performing Filipinx body on a global stage. Building on Burns’ work, I argue that puro arte, as affective terrain, accounts for the “unnamable intensities” (Georgis, “Discarded Histories” 155) that circulate around each child’s performance. Burns’ theory of puro arte helps to describe the affective engagements that audiences have with these children as being reliant on a history of colonial encounters between the Philippines and the United States. I suggest that the affective excesses contained in these performances enable an alliance with queerness not as an embodied certitude but as a method that creates new iterations of gendered and racial difference. A critical reading of these performances and their reception also offers commentary on how queerness emerges as both recognizable and politically contested in the Philippines and in the diaspora. Secondly, by drawing our attention to the history of Filipino taxi dance hall dancers in the U.S. and the performance of “perfect covers” (DeKosnik 139) by Filipinx singers on YouTube, I argue that we can grasp at how colonial histories of race, gender and sexuality have a genealogy that pre- dates the performances in “Balang” and “OFW Blank Space.” Here, I consider what dancing and singing does to affirm, rupture or adjust expectations of the Filipinx body on stage. What

35 political meanings can be found in the ways these children move and hold the gaze of the camera and those who give them audience? How might these performances animate affective traces that interrupt a fraught history of globalization and American–Philippine relations? What meaning can we glean from their queer associations?

In addition to theorizing puro arte as affective excess, underscoring my ideas in this chapter is the work of Dina Georgis, who insists that queer affect accounts for the “abject perversions of difference, not easily nameable” (“Discarded” 154). Queer affect, Georgis explains, are emotions that are attached to unconscious knowledge (Story 15). They are sensations that undo us because they exceed the confines of identity. As a phrase that registers the circulation and expression of queer affect, puro arte helps me to describe the historical racialization of the Filipinx performer while excavating the enigmatic agency that is in excess of each child’s cultural subjectivity.

Queerness is used here as a methodology that challenges hegemonic understandings of identity formation to make space for the creative ways Filipinx children contest and reimagine their racialized subjectivity. By examining the affective excesses of these performances, we can gain insight into how Filipinx diasporic experiences are complexly enunciated in their pursuits of building a creative relation to difficult affects created by histories of homophobia, colonialism and imperialism. The performance of music offers a surrendering to the unknowable affects inspired by movement and sound. Despite the structure of choreography and the pre-determined length and lyrics of American pop songs, both child’s relation to their performance is full of queer affect. They are unpredictably impacted by the music they perform and how their audiences receive them. Their performances provide room to encounter the unexpected, something Eve Sedgwick might call “queer possibility” (147). Through dancing and singing, they symbolize both conscious and unconscious phantasies and anxieties. Their performances are

36 sites of play, where the unconscious and difficult histories of race, gender and nation-state manifest and are re-worked.

Balang’s Dance: Puro Arte as Queer Affect

Balang, a ten-year old from Cavite, a small province located on the southern shores of the

Philippines, has garnered worldwide attention for his dancing. Balang is a talented dancer who is best known for his performances of elaborate dance routines to American pop hits. His YouTube videos have amassed millions of viewers, and he has been a frequent guest on Ellen. On Balang’s debut performance on Ellen, his arms flail, his hips gyrate, and he flutters his eyelashes while he lip-syncs to “Bang Bang,” a pop song performed by Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj.

Outfitted in a golf shirt that hugs his round body, his wrists flick from side to side while his face bursts with exaggerated expressions. In a fedora and dark-rimmed glasses, he aims to impress on his first visit to the United States. His choreography and lip-syncing awkwardly drifts off time while the audience laughs and cheers at his efforts to entertain them. He ends his performance with the splits, causing the crowd to erupt with applause. Balang, whose full name is John Phillip

Bughaw, is adored for the expressive and, arguably, queer passion with which he performs.

Through the expression of queer affects, Balang’s performance possesses reparative potential. In this chapter, I argue that Balang absorbs that which has aimed to assimilate his difference and uses it to feed his desire for pleasure. In Balang’s performance, we are witness to a re- interpretation of American culture that is motivated by both the individual child’s desires and the need to express the affective residues of imperialism. He excavates the vexed site of American popular culture, which has historically had a colonizing hold on Filipinx culture, for energy and sustenance.

On Ellen, Balang’s facial expressions are over-pronounced, and he lip-syncs to a pop song in

English, a language he does not know how to speak (he uses a translator for an interview with the show’s host). He stands on a little stage opposite an audience that expects to be entertained, and they are, laughing at his femininity and fatness. There is no adequate way to predict what

Balang’s gendered embodiment will come to mean to him; however, the online responses to his performances that have identified him as gay, queer, and bakla raise questions about how queer discourse is written upon this Filipinx child.14 After the performance, Ellen comments, “that was so entertaining, I could watch that for another hour” (“Balang’s US Debut”). Although his appearance on American television is a moment of entertainment, there is more to consider in relation to post-colonial framings of masculinity in Balang’s performance. Each of Balang’s movements playfully tests representations of Filipinx acceptability and belonging; perhaps unknowingly, the child’s performance sits within a long history of Filipinx bodies read by

Americans as entertaining, excessive, and even when embraced as exceptional, running the risk of being perceived as a “cheap trick or mindless aping” of American greatness (Burns 12).

Following the example of other Filipinx YouTube stars like Jake Zyrus, Balang admits he has learned to dance through copying performances he has watched on American television.15 Along with his capacity to entertain Ellen’s studio audience, his videos have amassed millions of views on YouTube, evidence that he is undoubtedly successful at attracting worldwide attention.

14 Robert Diaz explains that Bakla is a Filipinx sexual/gender term that “denotes gay male identity, male- to-female transgender identity, effeminized or hyperbolic gay identity, and gay identity that belongs to the lower class. The term is thus conditional and contextual, and its deployment often points to the geographic, temporal, and material constraints of its usage” (“Limits” 721). Diaz recommends Martin Manalansan’s book Global Divas for a more comprehensive examination of the term and its social implications. 15 See Christine Balance’s work for an in-depth analysis on Asian-American YouTube performance. In Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, Balance explores the impacts of “going viral” on Filipinx performer Jake Zyrus.

Watching Balang’s performance on Ellen is at once pleasurable and uncomfortable. Following

Lucy Burns’ deployment of the phrase, one might say that Balang is puro arte, or over-the-top. I can imagine my Filipinx family enjoying his performance but also calling the child “puro arte” in an effort to distance themselves from his queer excess.

Puro Arte and The Child Who Acts Out

Translated literally from Spanish to English, puro arte means “pure art;” however, in the

Philippines, it “performs a much more ironic function” (Burns 2). For Filipinos, puro arte embodies a more playful meaning, gesturing at that which is deemed to be overly dramatic behaviour. In Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, Burns contends that to be puro arte is to resist knowable expressions, and that in the invocation of the phrase there is a recognition of the creativity and theatrics required to “put on a show” (1). Burns’ theory of puro arte opens up an aesthetic space with which to theorize the psychic liminalities and contradictions of Filipinx subjectivity through performance. Overacting is aligned with creativity, aesthetics, and artful expression; the term, as Burns describes it, attempts to capture the potentiality of Filipino corporeality as it is acted out on stage. In this way, dancing like Balang’s is an aesthetic intervention that expresses puro arte as a means to insist on the agency of the racialized performer despite a history of colonial subjugation. Balang’s dramatic charisma is in defiance of the history that has tried to erase him, or, as the political cartoons described earlier might suggest, to “civilize” him. Burns suggests that calling someone puro arte is an attempt to discipline an unruly body or emotional response, an attempt to point out “the body’s performative extravagance, a spectacle making that must be disciplined [and] reined in” (1).

Psychoanalytic theories of child development (Dyer; Gilbert; Klein; Winnicott) suggest that healthy development involves some “acting out.” I suggest that we consider Balang’s dancing to

39 be a form of acting out unconsciously at a history of Filipinx performers being read through discursive constructions of race and racism.

Balang’s status as an Internet “sensation” earned him recognition in the U.S., where representations of the Filipinx performing body have been largely determined through the lens of sensationalism. Because of the colonial histories between the Philippines and the U.S., Allan

Punzalan Isaac proposes that there is often a psychic desire for Filipinx people to belong to the

U.S. nation as a “sensation” (xix). However, we might also be interested in sensation as an index of how the performing body feels and how the performing body is perceived by audiences. The sensations cathected onto Balang and his simultaneous creative re-working of them are a possible disruption of colonial intelligibility. Katherine Sugg describes how a “distinct economy of sensation” possesses the potential to push somatic expression into “unfamiliar territory” (144).

In the context of dealing with the psychic repercussions of colonialism, Sugg suggests that an excess of sensation “signals a rebellion against the codes of recovery” and proper “affective relations” (144). Balang acts out against assumptions of a docile and submissive Asian body, falling in line with a history of Filipinos who are called “sensational” for their agentic, kinesthetic performances. Balang’s “distinct economy of sensation” possesses the potential to undermine pathologies of race and gender all the while being regarded as entertainment for

Ellen’s audience (Sugg 144).

A reading of Balang through the lens of puro arte opens up a discussion of the socio-political contours of a queer childhood. Receiving a variety of responses from online audiences, Balang’s

“acting out” is most commonly read as “gay,” “homosexual,” “bakla” or “queer,” an association with sexuality and gender that I want to unsettle. In The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests that the child who doesn’t seamlessly grow in

40 line with heterosexual demands instead grows sideways. This sideways growth relies on adult theories of childhood development that determine what conditions are appropriate for a child to advance to adulthood. Stockton contests normative teleologies of childhood development by pointing out the inherent queerness of childhood. Stockton’s queer theory of childhood, in which some subjects aren’t deemed worthy of complete development, is useful for thinking about

Filipinx subjectivity as it relates to the American nation-state. Referred to as the “little brown brother” by Americans during the period of U.S. colonial rule, the Philippines is imagined into being as a country that isn’t allowed to grow up. Thus, the infantalization of the Philippines by the U.S. has determined Filipinx people as always already “queer” to teleologies of development.16 The reception of Balang as gay should be read as an inheritance of this history.

However, I don’t employ this term to suggest I know how Balang will identify his sexual orientation in the future. As Dyer has written, “queer” can potentially describe a child’s sexuality or identity, but can also provide language with which to describe the child’s creative resistances against normalcy (4). In her work, drawing on José Muñoz, queerness offers a critical framework that accounts for the creative ways children interrupt the social contract that underwrites their relation to the future. Balang may be considered a queer child who pushes against ideas of acceptable gender, race and sexuality. If queerness is loosened out of the holds of identity, it offers a mode with which to address feelings, objects and relations that contest normativity.

16 See Victor Mendoza’s Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and The Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913, where he describes how ascriptions of “queerness” share a legacy with “imperialism’s racializing discourse” in the context of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines (29). Mendoza suggests that Filipinx subjects were always already regarded as “queer” in the U.S. imperial project and that to summon the term in relation to Philippine subjectivity runs the risk of reproducing its imperial significations. That is, the Philippines was constituted as queer in order to assert the U.S.’ normalcy. He believes that making notice of this relation to imperial history requires a deprivileging of gender and sexual variance as a primary identifier, making room for recognition of processes of racialization (28).

Unlike the audience on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, or unlike Ellen herself, I do not want to sentimentalize Balang’s performance or reify racialized stereotypes of Filipinx people as overly dramatic copycats. Instead, I want to highlight how Balang’s dancing creates conditions for repair of a difficult past and uncertain future. Melanie Klein suggests that reparation involves the infant creatively integrating what it wants to nurture and destroy in order to sustain its world. For

Klein, reparation is motivated by the depressive position, whereby the ego communes the good and bad aspects of an object. Reparation also requires creativity wherein the infant needs to incorporate what it wants to nurture and what it wants to destroy in order to tolerate its world.17

In Balang’s performance, we witness a child seeking pleasure, and for Klein, this would be motivated by the desire to repair. Centering predominantly the acquisition of pleasure, the process of reparation is amenable to the “amelioration” of pain in exchange for the fulfillment of pleasure (Sedgwick 2003, Touching 144). According to Sedgwick, by complicating notions of what is pleasure, an individual defers expectations about the potential success of an action.

Instead, she explains, the process of “doing” comes into focus, which, in an Austinian framework, refers to the performative quality of the action (4). Rather than tuning into the potential colonial trappings of Balang’s performance, a reparative reading suggests that through

17 According to Klein, our adult lives are deeply connected to our earliest emotions about our mother (or primary caregiver). Feelings of love and hate are both facilitated through interactions with the mother and with the first object, the breast. A mother is both able to satisfy the demands of the infant by providing love, comfort, and nourishment and also create feelings of frustration and hatred through not heeding to these demands on time. The infant projects feelings of love and hatred onto the breast, splitting the object into good and bad. In the early stages of infancy, the breast is either good or bad, but never both simultaneously. Klein called this the paranoid-schizoid position. In phantasy, the infant projects destructive impulses towards the bad breast through biting and grabbing. These “attacks” on the breast are counteracted with feelings of gratification. As the infant grows, the hope is that she will better cope with the good and bad feelings. Klein called this process the depressive position, which correlates with the infant’s drive towards reparation.

“doing,” a more complicated and generative relation to abjection is enacted.18

A reparative reading of Balang’s performance on Ellen might argue that Balang re-works

American culture in an effort to more seamlessly belong, despite a history of subjection to empire. Through dance, he works through the tight hold American culture has on the Philippines and himself. Despite the Philippines being called the “little brother” of the U.S., Balang interrupts this history and affective hierarchy by remaining ambivalent to the demands of his colonial inheritance. Instead of wanting to straightforwardly spoil or destroy American culture,

Balang re-interprets American pop hits; he takes the original song and performance and makes it his own. Possibly, the multisensory and affective registers of sound provide Balang with a resource for dealing with the pressures of growing up that are unique to him as an individual but are also contoured with communal histories of imperialism, masculinity, and homophobia.

Uncoupling his performance from conventional frameworks of singing and dancing as performance to be consumed can instantiate alternative notions of sound and how it is perceived.

By lip-syncing, aesthetic value is not incumbent on Balang’s sonic or vocal mastery; instead, value judgments are uprooted from the naturalized expectations and parameters of vocal performance. Balang uses the structural limitations of the original song as a conduit of feeling and new meaning.

In Balang’s performance, we are witness to a child interacting with the world in ways that are both cognitive and unconscious. Sedgwick’s theory of reparation draws on Klein, who describes

18 Eve Sedgwick’s use of reparation insists on the creativity required to synthesize guilt into hope. Put differently, reparation involves creative reactions around negative motions like abjection, loss and mourning. Being hopeful entails not focusing too intently on the negative (or critique) of culture. She argues that “to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones” (Touching 146).

43 reparation as a process where the ego undoes harm done in phantasy (“Psychoanalytic Play”).

Reparation is a psychic process whereby the infant seeks to make amends for injuries caused by both its real and phantasmatic attempts to experience pleasure of its mother’s breast. Balang’s performance is a reparative act that seeks to undo the constraints of the American civilizing project while also finding pleasure in pleasing an audience. His dancing is a site of play where the unconscious manifests, whereby new articulations of Filipinx childhood are generated.

Through the repetition of these songs, Balang re-experiences his emotions and phantasies in relation to his Filipinx subjectivity. These encounters stage an opportunity to revise his relations to difficult encounters caused by racism, homophobia, and histories of colonization, and thus they begin to tolerate any anxieties. In Balang’s performance, we are witness to a re- interpretation of American–Filipino history that is motivated by repair and a recentering of

Filipinx desire and pleasure.

Balang’s “Splendid” Dancing

In Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, Burns provides an account of the history of

Filipino taxi dance hall dancers in the 1920s and early 1930s in the U.S., reading this historical moment as one that archives how Filipinos have been deemed exceptional performers by

Americans. In this section, I point out similarities between Balang and these dancers, and I more broadly read the Filipino dancing body as queer within a context of American imperialism. I continue to suggest that we can read Balang’s dancing as an attempt to shake the hold of empire that is still energetically present in the Philippines. I am not suggesting that this act of defiance is intentional, nor that the effect of his performance can be totalized as such; instead, I am interested in how his transmission of affect and vibration can potentially refuse the expectations of empire. His body is always already enmeshed in the legacies of American imperialism in the

Philippines, yet he fervently moves to disentangle the mess of his own subjectivity as constituted through a history of empire. The relationship between our material bodies and sound as a

“vibrational event and practice” is a fundamental conception driving this research (Eidsheim 23).

By theorizing Balang’s dancing body as a conduit of sound, I suggest that the queer sonics emitted by his performance are entropic. Despite sitting within a history of Filipinx performers that have “transform[ed] living song into living labour” (See) in front of a largely American audience, Balang converts vibrations into movements that are uniquely his own.19

In the 1920s and early ’30s, in large American cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles,

Filipino men made up “at least a fifth of the total patronage” at taxi dance halls (Cressy 45). A taxi dance hall was a nightclub where working-class white women were paid by men, most of whom were migrant workers, to dance with them. Like taxi rides, the female dancers expected some form of tip for their services. Taxi dance halls functioned as an important hub for socializing between immigrants during a tense political moment of heightened racial segregation and anti-miscegenation sentiment in the United States (Parreñas 115). In these spaces, Filipino men came into close proximity with white women taxi dancers. Burns explains that “for many

Filipino patrons going to taxi dance halls was often referred to as ‘going to class’” (49). The taxi dance hall was a social institution where Filipino men could be in proximity to whiteness and become acquainted with the social practices required to perform and “mimic” American culture.

19 For a more detailed of discussion of Filipinx cultural performers, specifically folkloric dancers and the surplus meaning that can be gleaned from their performances, see Theodore Gonzalves’ The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora. Through an examination of the Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN), an annual performance of Philippine folkloric forms such as dance and music, Gonzalves tracks a genealogy of Filipino dance theater, from its international popularity in the 1950s to its contemporary iterations as they are staged on university campuses throughout Canada and the United States. He argues that the cultural performer is entangled by a romanticized and ahistorical temporality: “[T]he native body is set free from modernity itself: unbridled and self-possessed, free of colonial mastery and industrial discipline” (28). Thus, the unruly body threatens the presumed innateness and staticity of Filipino Cultural production.

By “going to class,” Filipino men gained tenuous access to American life and sociality by purchasing dances with white women. The Filipino taxi dance hall dancer is “an archival embodiment” of the palimpsestic relations between “immigration, foreign policy, social institutions and Filipino corporeal colonization” (Burns 56).

In Burns’ historical archive of taxi dance hall, Filipino dancers were observed as arguably the most talented dancers. Often referenced to as “splendid,” “spectacular,” [and] “fancy,” the

Filipino male was suggested to exhibit unparalleled kinesthetic abilities and moved in ways that demanded attention (Burns 51). The Filipino’s knowledge of American dance steps was regarded as exemplary, and his quick learning of “American ways” was made sense of alongside discourses of racial exceptionality. In this summation of his skill, the trope of exceptionalism works to simultaneously veil and reveal the history of American imperial rule over Filipinos in the United States. The Filipino performing body was deemed “gifted” and “exceptional” through his perfection of American dance steps. Still, as Burns explains, “these markers of recognition highlight the Filipino performing body as ‘excess.’ That is, the very markers that make Filipinos visible are also the very signs that make impossible their acceptability in and belonging to

American political, social, and cultural fabric” (65). Deemed “hypersexual,” Filipino men in taxi dance halls were often understood to be the cause of a “miscegenation and contagion” between

Filipinos and white women (Burns 65). Burns argues that the Filipino body deemed splendid or exceptional “sediments and extends U.S. Colonial modes of commodification and racism” (52).

However, the taxi dance hall was not simply a site where Filipino men were subjugated or disciplined. The Filipino body, despite its freedom on the dance floor, was never wholly apart of the nation outside the dance hall. The “splendid dancing” was as much about a structural and reciprocal exchange as it was about pleasure.

The reception of Balang’s performance may situate him as an ontological offspring of the history of the Filipino taxi dance hall dancer. Within the framework of puro arte, Balang’s consumption can be understood as complexly gendered and racialized in exceptional ways. He performs on a stage where the history of American occupation in the Philippines is not verbally articulated but is nevertheless felt by many. In a short interview before his performance, host Ellen appears confused at Balang’s responses to her questions and makes remarks about the quality of his interpreter. She strategically facilitates the laughter of the audience at her guests’ expense. After the interview, Balang performs his lip sync and Ellen appears in a split screen that simultaneously displays her laughter; she is evidently entertained. Here, Ellen assumes the role of the benevolent, American beneficiary who praises Balang for his “exceptional” performance.

However, much like the taxi dance hall dancer, Balang’s Filipinx body is brought into social proximity with Americans through an entertainment venue wherein the value of his creative labour is unevenly distributed.

More broadly, Filipinx entertainers (singers, dancers, instrumentalists) are overrepresented in the transnational performance sector often assigned to entertain socioeconomically and racially privileged audiences. As a global labourer, Balang’s symbolic value emanates from a structuring logic that marks the Filpinx body as adaptable to precarious and unstable working conditions.

Martin Manalansan explains:

Filipinos have become synonymous with the care industry across the world.

Maid, nanny, waiter, cook, nurse, janitor, clerk, entertainer, prostitute ... the list of

occupational roles played by Filipinos in the transnational labor market goes on and on

like a painful litany of expendable characters. (“Servicing” 215)

Balang’s artistic performance has been called into being through the history of migration and labour, thereby joining a market of Filipinx people who are exceptional at “servicing the world”

(Manalansan “Servicing” 215). If we read Balang’s performance alongside a history of the

“splendid” Filipino taxi dance hall dancers and the dominance of Filipinx people in transnational performance sectors, we can grasp at a historical present in which this child comes to be recognized as exceptional for his ability to provide a service.20 Burns uses the term corporeal colonization to register the ways in which the Filipino body comes into contact with the tactics of the American Empire (63). In Balang’s case, the Filipino body has been disciplined by this history even before his arrival in the United States. The Filipino body remains a “complex mobility” that must traverse a web of U.S.–Philippine relations that surface in a multitude of emotional and historical entanglements (73).

For Rhacel Parreñas, Filipino taxi hall dancers contested subjection “through the maximization of their bodies as machines” (119). Under this schema, dancing is an assertion of presence that allows one to imagine a new embodied strength. Perhaps Balang dances despite the psychic impossibility of ever breaking free from the hold of a history of empire into which he was born and also the stigma that comes from racism, fatphobia, and homophobia. Balang’s unruly embodiment and his, in many ways undisciplined, performance showcases irrepressible pleasure and joy, which displaces normative notions of social order. The sound of an American pop song fills his body, and the historical claim of American imperial control is undermined by each expressive body roll and fist pump. Here, queer affect runs rampant. The choreography of his dance impacts the shape of his body, ever-shifting each breath he draws in and breathes out.

20 See Stephanie Ng’s important 2005 study of Filipino overseas performing artists (OPA’s), Performing the ‘Filipino’ at the Crossroads: Filipino Bands in Five-Star Hotels Throughout Asia, where she interrogates the socio-political conditions that shore up demand for Filipinx entertainers across Asia. I am particularly interested in her use of Timothy Taylor’s term strategic inauthenticity to explain the ways in which Filipinx performers use Western popular music as a method of resisting Orientalist conceptions of what is culturally and musically “authentic.”

Though he has clearly studied and practiced choreography, there are moments of spontaneity and lack of control. The timbre of his breath, which can be felt through his performance, changes in relation to his “involuntary responses” to the music and to his previously desired choreography

(Eidsheim 112).21 The queerness deployed in this performative space helps to destabilize hegemonic understandings of identity formation and rescripts the historical erasure of the

Filipinx child. Balang is the focal point of this scene and, unlike many representations of the

Filipinx child, is not solely being used to metaphorize the necessity of the American civilizing project. For Filipino taxi dance hall dancers, the mastering of American dance steps or the exceptional performance of these moves never securely guaranteed access to national belonging and citizenship. For Balang, his waving arms and whirling waist create an aesthetic space that is in excess of markers of acceptability and belonging, and thus, in his performance, one catches a glimpse of what Muñoz might deem queer futurity.

Balang extends his limbs to test his relations to the social world. His movements are rehearsed, but despite the discipline of choreography, his expressions of those calculated steps are full of unpredictable affect. Balang symbolizes his world through dance, both pleasing his audience and also himself. In History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, Michel Foucault reminds us that pleasure has unruly manifestations that are not always legible in ways we might expect, and that escape our capacity to theorize. Foucault suggests that the ways our bodies materialize pleasure are perhaps incalculable, and that the more we attempt to assign meaning or casualty,

21 For a comprehensive case study of how the body communicates sound through the modification of the breathing process and without the use of vocal cords, see Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Singing Happens before Sound. For example, Eidsheim writes that “because the vocal cords produce such beautiful sounds, they traditionally get all the attention, misleadingly subsuming the multifaceted collection of events that comprises singing into sound along…if we define singing as action, singing can and does happen independently of the vocal cords” (111). Here, I am interested in the body as a modality of sound that complicates the overall anatomy of how singing is produced and perceived.

49 the more we detract from the pleasure itself. There is no way to surmise the pleasure Balang might feel from the movement of his body that may be in excess of his choreography. However, within the discipline of lip-synced words and timed-out steps there is an aesthetic space for

Balang to express an unknowable agency that is outside the hold of empire and is solely his.

Blank Space and “The Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”

In 2015, a video of a child in an Internet café in the Philippines began to trend on social media sites. Titled “Kanta ng isang Anak para sa kanyang inang OFW ‘Blank Space’” (“Song of a child for her overseas foreign worker mother”), the video shows a girl singing via Skype to her mother, who is working in an unnamed location, presumably outside of the Philippines. “Ma kakantahan ulit kita ha?” (“I’ll sing for you again mom”), she says, and starts singing Taylor

Swift’s “Blank Space.” Her mother attentively watches and listens to her song, soon beginning to cry in longing for a daughter she has not seen in a long time. The girl’s attention is divided between the screen that shows the lyrics, the camera that films her singing, and her mother who quietly observes. This video has over 110,000 views and is one of many archived messages from a child singing or speaking to their mother who labours transnationally. Despite the video’s jittery framing and low quality, the intended message of shared longing across cyber and transnational borders is clear.

The Spanish-American war (1899-1902) resulted in the relinquishment of the colony of the

Philippines from Spain to the United States. This transfer of power instituted the imperial specter that continues to grip and haunt the archipelago. The many performances of American pop music on YouTube and stages throughout the Philippines are the “musical aftermath of US imperial cultures” (Balance 10). Having amassed over 97 million YouTube views in the Philippines,

Taylor Swift’s overwhelming popularity is evidence of this continued imperial presence. In the video that I read here, the young Filipinx girl sings lyrics written by Swift: “I’m dying to see how this one ends. Grab your passport and my hand.” When sung by this child, these lyrics take on different meaning than Swift likely intended. Perhaps, I will propose, the child is anticipating an end to the necessity of separation between mother and daughter.

While listening to the pedagogical potential of the cybercafé more broadly, a focus on the vocal performance of the child reveals our investment in what the sound of her voice tells us. The video starts with greetings spoken in Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines. When the backing track begins, the child makes a seamless transition into singing in English. In her vocal performance of the lyrics, her accent is almost undetectable. She sings with a dulcet tone that is clear and appealing. Her voice sounds well-trained and confident. If not for the video, one might believe the child to be a professional performer. In this scene, it is her voice that is marked and constituted by a narrative of assimilation.

Using song, the video provides evidence of what Hannah Dyer calls the “asymmetries of childhood innocence” (2-3), reminding its audience of the ways transnational labour and global capital impact children’s experiences of kinship and development. In The Queer Aesthetics of

Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development, Dyer suggests that some children are withheld the protective hold of childhood innocence:

Childhood innocence is a seemingly natural condition but its rhetorical maneuvers are

permeated by its elisions and attempted disavowals along the lines of race, class, gender

and sexuality. That is, despite the familiar rhetorical insistence that children are the

future, some children are withheld the benefits of being assumed inculpable. (2)

Drawing on Dyer, children who live without the physical presence of their mothers are “queer”

51 to normative theories of childhood development that affirm overwrought expectations of maternal presence. Dyer suggests that discourses of childhood innocence intend to subjugate the queerness of childhood and that these elisions hold bio-political significance. She emphasizes the child’s acts of symbolic expression when faced with social inequities. From within the field of critical child studies, queer theory, and object relations, she builds an argument that suggests when children cannot match words to feelings, they express their psychic and social conflicts aesthetically. That is, according to her, a child’s imagination elaborates resistances to the enclosure of childhood innocence as a barometer of value.

Ascriptions of childhood innocence thus require a child to replicate social norms, including the production of the nuclear family and the physical proximity of child and parent. In the

Philippines, where the liberalization of international trade and high levels of unemployment have disproportionately impacted the labour migration of women, structures of the nuclear family are being re-organized (Parreñas; Tungohan). Women who work outside of the Philippines and away from their families are paradoxically celebrated for their “sacrifice” while also subjected to disapproval over their absence (Tungohan). Statistics collected by the Philippine government report that in 2017, the number of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) was 2.3 million

(Philippine Statistics Authority). Since the 1970s, the Philippine government has institutionalized and supported citizens leaving home in order to labour in other nation-states. Remittances from

Filipinx labour enacted elsewhere accounts for a large portion of the Philippines Gross Domestic

Product. When mothers leave the Philippines, the care arrangements for children are shifted.

There is a growing recognition of the changing nature of motherhood within transnational contexts and the concomitant emotional consequences of negotiating “long distance intimacy”

(Parreñas; Francisco-Menchavez). The demands for transnational labour reconfigure Filipinx family formations and necessitate fraught intimacies between parent and child across borders. As

52 others have shown, cyber technologies like cell phones and the Internet initiate creative opportunities for children to be “virtually present” in the lives of their mothers and vice versa

(Madianou; Soriano).

Information communication technologies like Skype, Facetime, and Facebook Messenger have shaped the possibilities of building intimacy across borders. In “The Labor of Care,” Valerie

Francisco-Menchavez studies the reconfiguration of transnational Filipino families under neoliberal globalization.22 In her five-year study of Filipina migrants and their transnational families, she documents the emergent forms of care made possible through the ongoing development of digital technology. She argues that the simultaneity of experience via digital space enables a “continuum of multidirectional care work as a transnational practice” (11). As she demonstrates, care work is circulated by all family and kin relations through the exchange of skills and knowledge related to the use of communication technologies. Thus, the movement of care flows between multiple networks of kin as caregivers and care receivers. Francisco-

Menchavez suggests that sometimes these technologies are the only platforms that necessitate visual interactions between family members, and that these affective realities are a product of the political and economic demands of capitalism that create livelihoods contingent on separation.

For her research participants, the crafting of innovative strategies of staying connected in “real time” is only possible in a world where their very sustenance relies on their separation from their family. The “multidirectionality of care” (93) made possible through technology offers an alternative mode of relating not prohibited by the assumption that care requires corporeal encounters.

22 Francisco-Menchavez uses the term transnational family to defer the hegemony of nuclear configurations and to connote the production of family in two or more nation-states.

The video of the girl singing to her mother is an example of these modes of alternative relation.

Like my engagement with Balang, my reading of this video suggests that the child’s aesthetic expression helps to make notice of the entangled traces of colonialism and nation while resisting hierarchal structures that deem some childhoods more valuable than others. This child’s sonic performance is, I propose, a queer offering that creatively procures transnational connection. The child’s singing registers a queer frequency that destabilizes normative theories of child development that assume a mother’s physical presence as necessary to success. The girl’s performance suggests that psychic and political reparations can occur in the sounds the child makes. The tactile, spatial and physical qualities of her voice forge a new relation to her mother.

Her voice is affecting, seemingly moving her mother to tears and rousing the onlookers at the

Internet café to reorganize their bodies and sing along. In this video, we are invited to witness a child whose world has been altered by globalization and the continued geo-political violences enacted by the American empire. Given these circumstances, her creative deployment of kinship serves as a reminder that the affective fortitude of her voice tests physical and emotional borders.

The restraint of normative conceptions of family is ruptured when the child remakes her relation to her mother in ways that stir joy, collectivity and pleasure. I do not intend to negate the pain that may mark their separation, but instead locate epistemic significance in the agentic capacities of sound to produce new and creative relations in the world.

By observing and listening to the child’s song more closely, we can hear its potential to re-sound and re-imagine the parent–child relationship across borders. Campt suggests that “[s]ound can be both listened to, and in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt, it touches and moves people”

(6). I am not interested in delineating or restricting what counts as an object that transmits sound, but rather in broadening its definition so that we can be differently attuned to the psycho-social conditions that allow us to feel it. The sounds of “OFW Blank Space” linger after the clip has

54 ended. By listening for what is in excess of the video’s content, I consider the affective registers that enunciate alternative understandings of migration, family and belonging. There is a humming that is ubiquitous in the video. Perhaps it is the sound of the electric fans that run to combat the tropical heat of the Philippines. Maybe it is the collective buzzing from the computers that have been set up to provide the Internet to its cybercafé patrons. The acoustics of the space are at once mundane and haphazard, and at the same time, they are cogent indicators of the geopolitical truths echoing throughout the scene. With limited access to Internet in the home, the cybercafé has been a site that children frequent to communicate with their overseas parents

(Alampay et al.). The convergence of sound, technology and diasporic subjectivity becomes audible when the practice of listening is attuned to these methods of transnational connection.

The sounds of kinship can be felt in the exchange between mother and daughter. Put differently, the “sonic frequencies of affect” (Campt 42) tell a story of the racialized asymmetry of childhood innocence (Dyer) that informs their separation. In “OFW Blank Space,” we can register the phonic traces of global capitalism and its impacts on the Filipinx family. For example, the family in Canada or the U.S. who hires a Filipina woman to provide care for its children often disregards or diminishes her own potential subjectivity as a mother with children in the

Philippines. As Dyer describes, the invidious socio-political work performed through childhood innocence allows for a host of damages to be done to children:

Innocence is also contingency, negation and a brutal wounding that considers the needs

of some children over others…Childhood innocence…is a racial formation with a

historical character that is keyed into global itineraries of capital…rather than natural, the

effect of a discursive practice that has been shaped by histories of race and gender.

[Robin] Bernstein confronts the often intentionally forgotten racial history of childhood

in order to show how innocence is not extended equally. Her important study illustrates

that there are racial disparities coded into the paradigms of innocence and sentimentality

that have a long history that can be read for their contemporary political symptoms. (54)

I bring critical childhood studies to bare on these videos because it has the potential to theorize the child’s agency beyond the adult’s desires. Jacqueline Rose suggests that the complexity of childhood is sanitized by the desires of the adult in order to securitize their sense of authority over the child:

if we[adults] do not know what a child is, then it becomes impossible to invest in their

sweet self-evidence, impossible to use the translucent clarity of childhood to deny the

anxieties we have about our psychic, sexual and social being in the world. (xvii)

Like Balang, the child who sings to her transnational mother performs her own rendition of

American popular culture. It is both for the adult and for themselves; her interpretation of Swift’s song is both for her mother and her own psychic life and future orientation to kinship.

Puro Arte and Filling Blank Spaces The sonic and affective registers of the child’s song ask its audience to re-work theories of childhood development that insist “growing up” requires the physical presence of a maternal figure. Her song is an affective reservoir of hope and reparation that survives beyond the psychic and social demands of her mother’s transnational labour. In her song, a queer temporal and geographic plane is created, where sound temporarily collapses the distance she shares with her mother. To consider the value of her sonic offering and its symbolic purposes, I move towards understanding what makes its sonicity audible and affecting. Campt’s theory of sonic perception has helped to theorize the symbolic inscriptions and affective energies unleashed and operationalized in the video. Campt inquires into the pedagogical function of sound that exists in excess of what we perceive:

what becomes audible … when the practice of listening is not just about hearing, but an

attunement to different levels of … audibility, many of which register at lower

frequencies through their ability to move us? (42)

Campt, drawing on Paul Gilroy, defines sound as a crucial modality of “suppressed forms of diasporic memory” (6). Campt’s theorizing helps to explain how the act of singing can enlarge affective capacities for empathy. This child’s song makes notice of how the needs of the state and its domestic refractions impact Filipinx children. Sigmund Freud describes mourning as a

“reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, and ideal, and so on” (“Mourning” 245). He further suggests that the purpose of this psychic labour is to sever emotional attachments to the lost object so that this energy can be invested elsewhere and inevitably locate a replacement for what is lost. This is a process that takes place over time as we simultaneously cling to what has been lost in order to test the “reality” of that object no longer being there. Mourning, he describes, is a process that involves the psychic negotiation of our memories and the details of the present.

Eventually, the pain dissipates, and the lost object is replaced by something else.

In “OFW Blank Space,” the act of singing facilitates the process of mourning wherein the physical absence of the mother is transformed into a tolerable presence. The structure of the pop song and the process of singing potentially provide a format for the emotional work required in locating pleasure despite unfavourable and unjust circumstances. The sonic dimensions of her childhood, as registered through the video, enunciate the everyday practices of intimacy enacted between mother and child both despite and because of state borders. Within the restraints of everyday life, she repurposes the pop song as a conduit of feeling that resist duress resultant from imposed distance. The defining tension left after viewing and “listening disobediently” (Balance)

57 to the video is how to archive its message while preserving the child’s individual pleasure and desire.

Although the child’s performance recalls the residues of colonial rule over the Filipino body, using puro arte as a methodology allows for a de-centering of the racialized scripts that historically pronounce her as a docile colonial subject. In “OFW Blank Space,” the child embodies puro arte. By paying attention to the affective registers of her performance, we are witness to a child who is contesting the global forces that have separated her from her mother.

By turning the Internet café into a stage, and through her use of music as a frequency that crosses physical and emotional borders, this chapter has paid attention to “the creative labor devoted to making a spectacle” (Burn 2). The child playfully retools the American pop song into a method of queer world-making that rebukes economic injustice and its impact on Filipinx labour. Her embodiment of the multiple histories of the Philippines is uniquely expressed through sound and, if we listen closely, her reframing of maternal presence, though digital technology, is riven with creativity and political agency.

I have not asked that the child’s song be heard; rather, I have asked that it be listened to. Where hearing is commonly understood as a passive engagement with sound, Stoever describes listening as a deliberate act that “is an interpretive, socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations” (14). In this way, both hearing and listening are co-implicated in the intimate and ethical encountering of sound. It is for this reason – the racializing of sound and the sound of race – that I stress its ability to reveal the sonic remainders of geo-political histories informed by regimes of race, gender and sexuality. As I have discussed, post-colonial studies of Filipinx subjectivity note that mimicry appears as a familiar trope within Western descriptions of the Philippines (Balance;

Chow; Burns). The child’s vocal performance sits within a history of American occupation. The singing of American pop songs is a common practice in the Philippines and across the diaspora.

While it would be easy to dismiss the child’s vocal performance as lacking creative agency, she presents a vocality that is in excess of its referential meaning. The repetition of her vocal practice, what Butler conceptualized as “performative,” gives a sense of the constitutive power of the voice itself.

The child’s vocal performance is less about the meaning of the words being sung and more about generating a sense of connection through the act and feeling of singing. She presents what Campt refers to as “felt sound” (7); a sonic frequency that is multi-sensorial. Her voice intends to reach out and affect her mother. Weighted by “unsayable truths” that are in queer excess of words and sound, the mother is evidently moved. By tuning into the affective modality of the child’s voice, sound offers us an alternative sensorial meaning. It is possible that, perhaps, the child’s performance reminds her mother of their painful separation rather than relieving her. Here, sound functions as an uncanny return to the scene of the womb, where the infant experiences itself as other through the penetration of sound emanating from the social world. Instead, in this scene, we observe a mother who is touched by the voice of her child and is thereby reminded of their irrefutable separateness.

Conclusion

In “Balang” and “OFW Blank Space,” we witness children creatively symbolizing their desires and subjectivities through dancing and singing. Their acts of puro arte and its reception wrestles with the affective residues of imperialism. In order to consider how these children’s musical performances offer an aesthetic expression of resistance, I have asked: How do the children’s performances create sonic interventions that register a fraught history of American imperialism?

What role does the Internet play in the transmission of sound and the delineating of geopolitical borders? And how are hierarchies of childhood experience and their asymmetrical relations transmitted through their sonic performances? The queer frequencies of their performances have helped to meditate on these questions and consider how and why a Filipinx child both inherits and resists a legacy of aesthetic expression within the context of American imperialism.

As I have described, there is important scholarship written on the traditions of Filipinx performance as being deeply rooted in mimicry and imitation of American culture (Burns; Hsu;

Perillo). “Balang” and “OFW Blank Space” sit within a dense history of Filipinos performing

American pop songs online.23 Broderick D.V. Chow refers to this immense archive of performances as “viral Filipinos” (328). The popularity of these videos rests on “exceptional” acts of singing where performers are often adjudicated for how well they can imitate American pop singers. Historically, Filipinx performers have been so exceptional at “imitation” that scholar

Abigail de Kosnik associates these performances with a “Filipino brand” of music (149). The popularity of this “brand” gestures to the racialization of Filipinx people within the context of

U.S.–Philippine imperial relations. Burns notes, “Within the context of U.S. empire in the

Philippines, ‘exceptionalism’ emerges as a hegemonic construct that ‘forgets’ the calculated pursuit of the Philippines by the United States … it erases the violent implementation of

American rule in the Philippines” (52). The emergence of this particular brand of voice relies on racialized discourses of exceptionalism where “talent” elides the crosscurrents of racial formation, politics and performance. For example, in “OFW Blank Space,” the child performs in a similar vocal range and tone to Taylor Swift. Impressively singing in perfect pitch, the child’s voice mirrors Swift’s vocal vibrato and dynamic shifts in volume. Her accent is seemingly

23 See Balance and Chow for more on viral Asian YouTube stars.

60 disappeared, and she sings with confidence. With many YouTube spectators commenting on the

“nice” and “pretty” qualities of her voice, the child is held by a colonizing gaze that determines her talent based on her ability to sound like Swift.

I do not intend to elide the complicated colonial dynamics that play out in the necessary act of imitating American ways in order to more smoothly gain access to notions of acceptability and belonging. Rather, I mean to argue that “Balang” and “OFW Blank Space” sit within a history of

“playful consumption of hegemonic standards of beauty, femininity and masculinity” (Burns

142) that can be read as a queer act of re-making and knowing the world. The re-appropriation of

American culture by post-colonial subjects such as these children offers us something new that reaches towards what Muñoz describes as a queer horizon. In his interview with Ellen, Balang is asked what he wants to be when he grows up. His translator says, “he wants to be a Zumba instructor for us to be healthy” (“Balang”). Against fat-shaming, I read this comment for

Balang’s desire to help an audience be psychically healthy, which involves “acting out.” How might the Filipinx children examined in this chapter create an aesthetic intervention that interrupts a fraught history of American–Philippine relations? How might sound and performance produce a site of contestation against a history of infantilization whereby some form of childhood agency is revealed? Through his translator, Balang comments that “when he watches tv [presumably American tv] and when he hears a song, he can easily jive with it.”

Perhaps from Balang we can learn how creativity gives expression to that which is difficult to know and understand. Balang’s level of awareness of the political and social dynamics that create the conditions of his subjectivity does not undermine how his dancing contributes to a new understanding of the world around him. I have reflected on the genealogy of Filipino taxi dance hall dancers in order to contextualize the ongoing negotiation of Filipino belonging within the hold of American empire. I have also argued that Balang’s dancing and performance shares a

61 palimpsestic kinship to that of the Filipino taxi dance hall dancer, both of which could be described as “queer” and as “acting out” in order to make sense of and be made sense of in the world.

Chapter 2 Queer Dissonance in Pantayo’s Kulintang

“One way that we can make this world feel like home for folks like us is to mix

the kulintang music that we learned with different sounds and song structures

that feel familiar to us.” (Kat Estacio)

“As a structure of feeling, queer diasporas also indexes lost and forgotten

desires, those stubborn remainders of affect that individuate through their ardent

refusal of the orthodoxy of conventions, the great expectations of social

agreement.” (David Eng 58)

“Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It is totally private, yet its

trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside.” (Anne Carson

130).

The band Pantayo is Eirene Cloma, Michelle Cruz, Joanna Delos Reyes, Kat Estacio, and

Katrina Estacio. Brought together by diasporic connections to the Philippines and a desire to reframe expectations of what kulintang music is and can be, their music resists the enclosures of genre and style. Rhythmic patterns of kulintang extend into a bed of sounds that are both digital and analog. In Pantayo’s music, the chime of metal gongs sits within an expansive cast of beats and grooves. Their lyrics traverse language and feeling; sometimes defiant and sometimes disclosing the tender urgencies of love, connection and devotion. From track to track, their songs disrupt musical and geographic borders as they summon sounds and sensations from multiple psychic and social repositories. As a collective, Pantayo make songs about desire, the residues of ancestry, the longevity of feminist collectivity, and the tensions produced by being accountable to a “homeland” that one leaves behind or has never intimately known.

62 63

Pantayo, in Tagalog, means “for us.” In their song, Heto Na, the band sings, “Umindak ka na kaya. Kaliwa dalawang paa. Pakapalan no mukha” (“Ready, set, go strut your stuff. To the left, lock in both your feet. Own up to that funky shit”). Inspired by OPM (Original Pilipino Music) disco songs from the 1970s, this song first gently and then forcefully nudges listeners onto the dance floor: a space where vulnerability and bravado are seamlessly entangled. This invitation to let loose and “own up to that funky shit,” as they articulate it, seeks out a reparative encounter that requires both social confidence and concession to the beats they craft. Music and its performance provide Pantayo with an aesthetic space to work through the violence of migration, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Heto Na means “here we go” and is the name of one of

Pantayo’s many songs that is oriented towards hope, justice, and a commitment to seek out an ethical relation to Filipinx history, geography, and migration and to the queerness that knots all of these sites together.

Self-described as “an all-women lo-fi R&B gong punk queer collective based in Toronto,”

Pantayo have played shows across multiple continents. In February 2016, at the Garrison Music

Club, a Toronto bar, sounds from the striking of gongs filled a dimly lit room. Adorned in beadwork and textiles from the southern Philippine province of Mindanao, Pantayo introduced their audience to the rhythmic patterns of the kulintang. The drummer began with a pulsing four- on-the-floor beat, the gongs entered the composition, and the wooden mallets wandered the vast collection of hanging and horizontally laid gongs. There was a multiplicity of notes and a rhythmic sound of wood hitting brass. The gathering of tones and sonicity was affecting. On this evening, Pantayo filled the bar with repetitive gestures and circuitous rhythm and melody. A review of the show described their performance as “dissonant and spooky” (Williams). Another reviewer described their sound as encompassing a range of “soothing to dissonant” tones

(Bouchard). I pause on these descriptors of sound – “dissonant” and “spooky” – because they

64 yield a hermeneutics of listening that is also about race, diaspora, and that which defies normalcy. Implicit in these reviews are the social and psychic bifurcation of harmony and discord, normative and non-normative.

A term used to refer to a horizontal row of gongs, kulintang also describes the ensemble that accompanies this instrument. Pantayo’s performative expressions of Filipinx culture and use of kulintang call into question the utility of music as a conduit of transmitting the complex emotional dimensions of being racialized and queer in Canada. Their music is evidence of the new forms and meanings kulintang takes on as it travels within different social and cultural contexts. Kat Estacio, a member of Pantayo, embraces the potential of creating kulintang music that integrates their personal musical tastes alongside more traditional Philippine-based genres and playing techniques. In describing Pantayo’s music, she writes, “We’re creating different conversations on what we can do with kulintang music. I find that we tend to add pop-inspired rhythms and arrangement, and this is what I think makes our sound a bit different” (Pino et al.

138). Combining guitars, synthesizers, and drum machines, the melding of kulintang with conventional instruments makes for a collective sound that is dissonant and multivalent. In particular, what is striking or “a bit different” about the kulintang is that as part of Pantayo’s broader instrumental arrangement, the gongs notably break the harmonics of these conventional instruments, producing a dissonant sound or a queer sonic that desires to touch the past and summon the Philippines and genealogy.

As a secondary aim, this chapter also engages Pantayo’s kulintang music as a collective endeavor that animates feminist practice as a space of kinship and conviviality. As an all-women identified music group that is creating and performing music in Canada, Pantayo use kulintang as a method of undermining gendered tropes that racialize Filipinx women as primarily caregivers

65 and caretakers. Joanna Delos Reyes, a member of the collective, reflects:

If you look at the Filipino diaspora, women’s labor is stereotypically tied to being nurses

and caregivers I the health care industry. We have so much respect for these women,

because they are pillars of our community. Presenting Pantayo as an all-women group

who works in arts and culture merely adds to the dialogue of what Filipino women are

doing in the diaspora. Given the ways that colonial/imperialist values impact gender

stratification in diaspora Filipino communities and families, it is even more important to

have creative spaces for Filipino women to be seen. (qtd. In Pino et al. 140)

As a project aimed at the representation and recuperation of what it means to be a Filipinx woman in Canada, Pantayo use sound to communicate the ways in which their diasporic condition engenders affective dissonance. The challenges of migration, visibility and respectability are reflected in dissonance’s refusal of coherence. In Pantayo’s music, the kulintang is used to broker the elisions between home and an “imagined” homeland, and the dissonant sounds they produce index a method to think about the inassimilable forms and affective realities of Filipinx diasporic subjectivity. The psychic life of sound allows Pantayo to imagine themselves as otherwise to the burdens of both the Canadian and Filipinx nation as they create sounds that are uniquely dissonant and diasporic.

I begin to make my arguments in this chapter by offering a brief survey of literature that theorizes dissonance from a psychoacoustic perspective. From there, I further explain Pantayo as a collective of musicians that embraces and finds strength in creating dissonance. Pantayo’s use of kulintang becomes, for me, an example of how a musical practice and its instruments can be charged with the affective surge of colonial history and a desire to represent the psychic life of diaspora to an audience. In an effort to show how the residues of colonialism in the Philippines is infused in Pantayo’s contemporary performances, I offer a detailed history of kulintang and its

66 relation to complicated psychic processes of identification and projection. My reflection on

Pantayo’s craft also underscores the queerness of their sound and its sonic frequencies. Thus, this section also turns to queer theory in an effort to describe how their sounds make auditory the collusion of affect, history, and complicated dynamics of difference. The psychic life of sound and its vibrations allows Pantayo to imagine themselves as otherwise to the burdens of both the

Canadian and Filipinx nation, creating sounds that are uniquely dissonant and diasporic. Before concluding, I meditate on the ways that music can create pathways between diasporic generations, allowing one to connect psychically and emotionally to histories of migration.

Ultimately, I suggest that the dissonant sounds Pantayo produce expose a compression of temporalities and diasporic vulnerabilities within the management of the Canadian nation-state.

When Pantayo play a show, they offer a gathering of tones and sonicities that call into question the stakes of playing music for an audience.

“Come with Me:” Beyond the Sound of Multiculturalism

In an interview, Pantayo member Kat Estacio speaks about the economy of stereotypes that circulate around Filipinas in Canada. “Filipinas in the diaspora – when people think about them, what’s the immediate stereotype?” she asks, alluding to the service-sector jobs – caregiver, nanny, cleaner – many first-generation Filipinas have to take. “So if women are playing percussion, that’s always a statement. We’re just providing another perspective on what Filipinas can be” (Varty). Pantayo was formed in 2012, in Toronto, Canada. Brought together by a kulintang workshop led by former member and co-founder, Christine Balmes,

Pantayo were committed to learning the history and attendant techniques of kulintang playing from the Philippines. On their Bandcamp page, they describe their music as being “grounded in traditional kulintang music of the Maguindanaon and T'boli peoples of the Philippines” but insist

67 it also “explores the possibility of kulintang music influenced by our identities as diasporic

Filipinas.”24 The group has played shows across Canada, and they organize music workshops to more deeply describe the historical origins and playing techniques of kulintang music and its potential to facilitate cross-cultural connections. Pantayo’s music prominently features the kulintang as a mechanism of cultural identification while more broadly reflecting the colonial and transnational histories of the Philippines. The Estacio sisters moved to Toronto from the

Philippines as teenagers. Cloma, Cruz, and Delos Reyes were all born in Canada to immigrant parents. Kat Estacio describes Pantayo’s music as motivated by a shared desire to examine the meaning of being Filipinx in the diaspora. She explains that their music is about “uncovering tidbits of what our identity means as, you know, Filipinos who aren’t in the Philippines, and who are settlers in another land” (Varty).

Robert Diaz’s work on how queer diasporic Filipinx people push at the limits of Canadian multiculturalism is especially significant here. Diaz writes, “Filipino/a Canadian artists … have reanimated the body and its erotic potentialities in order to critique the colonizing and racializing practices of the multicultural colonial state” (332). Diaz critiques Canadian multiculturalism as a state policy that fails to account for the specificity and intersectional experiences of racialized, queer and diasporic subjects. As Rinaldo Walcott has also explained, rather than a site of liberation, multiculturalism can operate as a state tool of containment (Queer Returns). It is a political program and rhetorical apparatus that helps to contain what is in excess of heteronormative and white supremacist expectation. Despite the rhetoric of celebration around

Canada’s multiculturalism policies, Pantayo forge a queer collective imaginary that functions against narratives of inclusion which demand particular performances of gender and sexuality.

24 https:/pantayo.bandcamp.com

At the centre of their musical practice, Pantayo have created a new modality of music that illuminates the sonic and cultural dissonances that imbue their experiences as a queer Filipinx collective creating and performing music in Canada. Their music, their racialized bodies, and their queer desires are not so easily assimilated into overwrought state narratives of inclusion and belonging.

In the opening bars of Divine, a sequence of two-note intervals from a Wurlitzer sample rise and fall into a cavern of delay. A subtle high hat enters the scene, offering a warm invitation to the remaining instruments to join the composition. The song comes to a halt as the Wurlitzer hits a third chord (F#6/9), opening us up to a new musical phrase. A full drum kit, assertive bass line, and the patter of kulintang gongs is then revealed as the song’s instrumental scaffolding. After we are invited into the groove and porous textures of the instruments, Eirene Cloma’s voice folds into the music. In a smooth contralto, Cloma compels us with the following lyrics:

Our love is divine, I breathe it in my soul.

I know we ain’t got much time, much time, much time.

Our love is divine, I see the distant stars

igniting bright lights on fire, on fire, on fire.

I dream of eternity, come with me. Our love is divine.

There are many stars before that never aligned.

To have this time with you, my life I’ll sacrifice.

Our love will find a way. Our love is divine.

Then, returning to the intro, rather than using chords that define a major or minor tonality, the opening ostinato shifts between two open-fifth intervals. Without the presence of a 3rd, which would help to more fully realize a major or minor quality, the song deepens its mood. The sonic ambiguity is further emphasized by the dissonant contributions of the kulintang gongs. Implicit

69 in this introduction is the sense of movement and possibility that dissonance produces. The kulintang gongs bleed into the weighted quiet between each sung phrase. While Cloma’s voice soothes in an incantation of desire and devotion, it is the dissonant sound of the kulintang gongs that, in their own way, announce a queer presence. Emerging in response to the lyrics “I dream of eternity,” “come with me,” and “our love is divine,” the kulintang gongs mark trajectories of desire with notes and timbres that are open, hospitable, and queer.

Through this expression of love, Divine provides sound to that which is out of place or sometimes difficult to register. Providing rhythm and melodic support, the kulintang gongs contribute tonal dissonance within the conventional arrangement of an R&B pop song. The ring from their polyrhythms sonically breaches from the dominant harmonic structure and crosses the central threshold of the song

In Divine, the kulintang instantiates what Crawley calls “otherwise” of form and genre. The harmony and dissonance that is produced are imbricated in each other, offering notes, timbre and a sonic environment that is, as Duke Ellington suggests, “something apart, but an integral part” of the listening experience (qtd. in Heble, Wrong Note 20).25 Following Cloma’s request to

“come with me, come with me” because “our love will find a way,” Divine urges us to move with the song and trust that the departure from harmonics can inaugurate openness. This is a sound that doesn’t forego the appeal and security that musical consonance provides; instead,

Pantayo carefully incorporates dissonance in recognition of its unassimilablity in order to seek out new ways of listening, feeling, sensing and desiring.

25 Ajay Heble writes about Duke Ellington in Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice.

The notion of “dissonance” has developed a tension between, on the one hand, a certain rule of digestibility, and on the other, a susceptibility to the ambiguity of difference. For this reason, I draw parallels between hegemonic conceptions of sonic dissonance alongside the contradictions of creating and performing racialized sounds in a Canadian music climate that centers white supremacy. Joanna Delos Reyes explains: “With Pantayo, I’m in a position of navigating the indie music scene – and almost infiltrating it. We’ve been given platforms … to play music shows as queer brown women. That’s really neat. Experiencing all these with Pantayo is what gives me a sense of belonging, because I get to represent in a mainly white male-dominated scene with people who are like me” (qtd. In Pino et al. 137). As she reflects on the realities of the indie music scene as hegemonically white, Delos Reyes suggests that she is aware of the contradictory affects of belonging. Her brown, queer body belongs, in dissonance, with those who are also “out of place.” Here, dissonance can be read as an agentic force that forges a sense of community in defiance of embodied and tonal norms. As such, Pantayo pushes against the prevailing influence of “tonal laws” – a Western system of musical structuring that regulates distinctions of pleasure and discomfort, insinuating that the atonal note is a “queer sonic.” Their music fends off musical resolution in order to imagine other modes of harmony and belonging amidst difference. Pantayo’s sound is recuperative and reflective of queer dissonance precisely because it is at once defiant of the Western hegemony that attempts to constrain its sonic possibility and animating the affective dissonance engendered by the challenges of being queer,

Filipinx women in Canada.

Ashon Crawley uses the phrase “otherwise possibility” to connote existing alternative modes of living that are actively and violently suppressed in order to maintain the narrative coherency of the American state. Turning to modes of vocal and performative exaltation such as shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues, Crawley describes such oratory practices as “otherwise

71 possibilities” that challenge Western theology and philosophy that bound Black flesh to racialized epistemologies. His imagining of aesthetic representations of Blackness as embodied by sonic events like breathing and noise is important to my theorizing of dissonance. For

Crawley, “[o]therwise is a word that names plurality as its core operation, otherwise bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped” (Blackpentacostal 24). From Crawley, I understand breath, noise, and the embodied properties of sound’s potential to bring language to the intensities with which the sonic traverses through diasporic routes of expulsion and then belonging.

Dissonant sound, in my assessment, is always on the move. It is a sonic event that is in perpetual suspense, a vibrational frequency that remains in anticipation of an impossible resolve.

Dissonance captures sonic intimacies that have been characterized as intolerable, and this is its transformative achievement. The dissonant sound is bound to the hegemony of listening that insists on harmonic resolve, but in this chapter, I offer dissonance as a method of queer world- making where irruptive potential is its resistance against resolve. In Cruising Utopia, José

Muñoz theorizes “queer” as a horizon that exceeds the limitations of the here and now, offering a potentiality in which to dream up new social configurations and ethical imperatives to treat others kindly and with a commitment to justice. In this way, dissonance is a sonic epistemology that is not only queer but is also an affective site that defies the restraint of normative structures of perception and treats others with kindness through withholding promises of completion.

Dissonance is a queer sonic that engenders a new sensorial encounter that produces critical discourse on relatedness, difference, and futurity.

The Dissonant Sounds of Pantayo

Broadly conceived as dischord, musical dissonance is generally defined as a state and effect of a lack of resolution. For example, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (2004) describes dissonance as a “chord which is restless, jarring to the ear, requiring to be resolved in a particular way if its presence is to be justified by the ear (or the note or interval responsible for producing this effect)” (201). Dissonance offers a useful mode of critical practice with which to think racially about sound, and to describe the sounds of race that “refuse to be resolved.” As Crawley discerns, the sounds of race are made manifest socially – they vibrate through people, history and relationality (Blackpentacostal 17). In this way, we must consider how the aesthetic production of dissonance sits within a complicated semantic and musical history.26 The sensual apprehension of dissonance occurs in relation to its institutionalized distinction from consonance.

Said otherwise, we only hear or feel dissonance in relation to how we conventionally understand consonance, or what is deemed “pleasing to the ear.” Where consonance is perceived to be a combination of musical tones that are felt as satisfying and restful, dissonance describes unstable intervals that interrupt aesthetic norms and conventions. If dissonance is signified as being outside of convention, then I seek a method with which to interrogate the historical and socio- political underpinnings of musical dissonance as a racializing and gendering mechanism.

In musical terms, the functional implications of dissonance refer to inharmonious sounds or the clashing of musical notes (i.e., semitones), specifically, notes that are exempted from the tonal hierarchies of Western music. Notes and chords played in “perfect” intervals or pitches that are harmonic are often equated with consonant sounds that render “agreeable” and pleasant effects.

Alternatively, Western theories of music describe dissonant intervals as simultaneous or

26 See also James Tenney’s A History of Consonance and Dissonance.

73 successive sounds that produce an affectively harsh rubbing of notes; a sonic tension that evades musical resolution. Dissonant sounds are unresolved sounds that are often heard as “wrong notes” until they are “assimilated to the consonant fabric” (Bharucha 485). While the perception of musical consonance and dissonance have been widely debated (Helmholtz; Tenney; Hartman), psychoacoustic explanations often claim that dissonance is produced by a nearness of musical overtones that affect the same region of the basilar membrane in the ear (Bowling and Purves;

Bidelman and Grall). This is not to say that accounts of dissonance can be simply deduced to psychoacoustic logics; as this dissertation suggests, listening is a subjective experience that also involves psychic processes of mourning, loss, and reparation, for example.

In an essay titled “On Popular Music,” Theodor Adorno proposes that aesthetic norms are established through processes of recurrence and identification. The tonal and melodic hierarchies of Western music, or what he refers to as the “standardization of the norm,” is related to the absence of critical consciousness (Adorno and Leppert 445). Adorno suggests that a listener’s pleasure is often enforced by tonal patterns that are easy to identify and sound familiar to them.

He makes clear that these mechanisms of identification with musical norms are symptomatic of a

“regression in listening” that bears socio-political implications (444). Adorno advocates that artwork created with the intent of serving commercial interests imply the repression of tones that are not prescribed within the Western tonal hierarchy. Writing specifically about the reception of popular music, Adorno argues that “[s]tructural standardization leads listeners to regard commercial music as “natural,” and anything that deviates from it as “unnatural” (306). The recurrence of Western tonal schemas forms a modality of listening informed by familiarity.

When Western music is given prominence, the inevitability of certain tones and melodies become tacit knowledge (Cazden; Bharucha). Within this tonal hierarchy, dissonance is felt as transgressive and, often, as rough.

Adorno likens the imposition of tonal hierarchies to violence against aberrant aesthetics.

Aesthetic norms and conventions safely stow anxieties, displeasures and sadness in feelings of familiarity. In relation to music, this suggests that we derive pleasure from the familiar and are psychically corralled by what is recognizable. The pervasive authority of Western musical norms rejects the emancipatory potential of the brown, sensual resistances that members of Pantayo describe. Put differently, dissonance, when experienced as a sound that disobeys Western harmony, is the affirmation of alterity. Therefore, the episteme contained in assertions that dissonance is subjugated to consonance is racially and culturally loaded. Dissonance as method urges us to examine what Ajay Heble describes as the “social processes and institutional practices that frame the production of knowledge” (Wrong Note 4). The value of dissonance, musically and politically, lies in its capacity to illuminate what is deemed in opposition to hegemonic social norms.

Heble writes about the oft-cited moment when Duke Ellington invoked dissonance to describe the Black American experience. Hitting a dissonant chord on the piano, Ellington stated, “That’s the Negro life … Hear that chord. That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part” (qtd. in Heble, Wrong Note 20). The deployment of dissonance signals a productive “out of place-ness” or interruption with which to consider dynamics of power. I don’t want to suggest that queer Filipinx experience maps neatly onto the life of Duke Ellington or Black America more broadly; rather, I invoke this moment to suggest that dissonance offers a complex mode of self-representation in opposition to taxonomies of race.

Arnold Schoenberg has proposed that the function of dissonance relies on its listening audience.

He writes, “What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility” (qtd. in Dahlhaus 235). In this way, comprehensibility is accountable to the racialization of listening, where some harmonies are

75 more familiar and therefore acceptable as a result of the axiomatic trajectories of whiteness.

Schoenberg suggests that dissonance in music holds the capacity to reveal extra-musical elements in a composition that serve as a mode of signification outside of the music itself.

Indeed, thinking about the ways in which racism, homophobia, and other sites of exclusion have differently impacted the members of Pantayo, dissonance can be sensed on multiple planes.27

Standardized structures in popular music deliver the promise of relaxation, because mechanisms of pleasure have been sutured to the reoccurrence and identification with Western musical norms, including whiteness. A racialized hierarchy of listening has favoured the mass production and consumption of consonant sounds largely produced by the white mainstream. When sounds are deemed “out of place” by Western hierarchies of listening, dissonance becomes a useful analytic with which to examine the intimacies between dissonance, racial difference, queer desire and politics of representation. If select sounds are signified as being outside of

“comprehensibility,” then dissonance can be deployed as a broad signifying concept with which to examine these sites of marginalization.

In Poetics of Music, Igor Stravinsky suggests that dissonance anticipates needed change and that it is sometimes mechanized for its transitory functions. When trained in musical hierarchies celebrated by Western frameworks, a musician can use dissonance to induce a desire for

27 In the groundbreaking and often-cited Feminine Endings, Susan McClary suggests that the Other in music (such as dissonance) has been historically coded as “feminine” within Western structures of tonality. This Other must be domesticated in order to restore social order, which she argues involves a return to the masculine domain. The masculine domain secures stable tonalities and permeates structures of thought and reception in relation to music. McClary further suggests, “The feminine never gets the last word within this context: in the world of traditional narrative, there are no feminine endings” (16). While her uses of the semiotics of “masculinity” and “femininity” reproduce overwrought dualisms of gender and binaries that can recodify patriarchal structures of knowledge, McClary’s claim that the unruly underpinnings of the conventions of music composition perform powerful ideological work impacts my own thinking about the deployment of queer sounds in music.

76 consonance. Dissonance is implicitly dissatisfying, because the sound of incongruous notes is too unfamiliar. The tacit hierarchy of Western tonal schemes thereby assigns resolution to a subsequent consonant event. Stravinsky offers a way to think about dissonance by problematizing the necessity of resolve, not only in music but also as a modality of being:

Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word dissonance has carried with it a certain

odor of sinfulness ... Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an

element of transition, a complex or interval of tones which is not complete in itself and

which must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance ... But nothing

forces us to be looking constantly for satisfaction that resides only in repose. (qtd. in

Tenney 3)

In querying the possibilities for dissonance in music, Stravinsky demonstrates the rule of

“repose” implicit in Western musicology. Dissonance is a pathway to satisfaction, or “perfect consonance.” Rather than think of consonance and dissonance as constitutive of each other in ways that rely on a binary between the Philippines and Canada, Pantayo attempts to push at the discursive limits of dissonant sound in the diaspora to interrogate its symbolic capacity. What would it mean to experience dissonance without the expectation of a subsequent resolve? What if we defy this temporal ordering and instead linger in its potential to play with affective meaning?

What, for example, is foreclosed or subjugated when reviewers describe Pantayo’s sound as dissonant? Tonal hierarchies enable the racialization of sound, whereby “[t]hese hierarchies are internalized by members of a culture, and facilitate the processing of music of that culture”

(Bharucha 486).

Pantayo’s music is described as “spooky” because it defies the constraints of normative tones that produce the desired aesthetic effect of Western harmony. The description of their music as such points to the interpretive paradigms with which we formulate our reception to particular

77 sounds and the methods with which they are produced. Adorno suggests that the listener internalizes the principles of tonal music, whereby “the composition hears for the listener”

(Adorno and Leppert 306). The listener submits to an aesthetic experience that has been pre- determined or “predigested” as pleasurable (442). Adorno further proposes that dissonant sounds expose the “repressive pleasure” of harmony (442). That is, a sense of liberation can be derived from the recognition that the allure of harmony or consonance requires obedience to Western musical norms. Acquiescence to Western popular music and its reliance on stock chord progressions surrenders uniqueness and dispels the emancipatory function of dissonant sound.

The illusion of harmony and its relation to pleasure can be related to Pantayo’s failure to incorporate into ideals of compulsory whiteness, often expected in independent music scenes in

Toronto. Their sound is not so easily tethered to Western tonal-based assimilation.

Applying a more attentive listening practice to Pantayo’s music requires both affective and theoretical approaches insistent on imagining larger networks of sensation that are not necessarily tied to conventional harmonic modes. Queer theory, then, can become a key methodology and theoretical framework for examining the transformative potential of their sonic dissonance. Following the work of queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Gopinath, José

Muñoz, and Jasbir Puar, I assert that queerness (as affect, as method, as subject formation, as identification) helps to imagine how racialized and sexually marginalized subjects challenge hegemonic expectations of whiteness, heteronormativity and citizenship. In relation to Pantayo, queerness can help to register the sonic contributions they gift to listeners because it helps to conceptualize that which rubs against normalcy. Recognizing the value of being unbound from cultural expectations, Edward Said constructively writes, “With so many dissonances in my life

… I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place” (Place 295).

I am interested in how diasporic subjects, like members of Pantayo, living in the aftermath of colonial dispossession, use sound to manipulate and symbolize understandings of home, family history, and kinship that exceed the rules of consonance. Like queerness, dissonance is what is in excess of normative expectation. Dissonant sound enables an experience of music that displaces the constraints of harmonic conventions and dispels the myth that consonant music is of fundamental importance. Pantayo’s melding of kulintang and Western instruments produce a dissonance that gestures to other affective possibilities that are in excess of the sounds that white audiences in Canada are accustomed to hearing.

Interestingly, in a reflection on the work of dissonance in punk music, Robert Ryan describes the ways in which dissonance is affiliated with being unstable and unrooted in the genre. In a blog post, he writes, “Dissonance appears as an exclusively negative category. A departure from stability is announced, and dissonance appears as something unsettled, a sense of peripheral movement that has yet to find a ‘primary’ or central sense of home” (Ryan). Sound that queers a sense of home compels an opening to consider the value of the movement and how migratory routes are affectively registered and symbolized. Pantayo sounds the dissonance of vexed affiliations to “home,” as Kat Estacio has stated:

Moving to Canada in my late teens, I found myself pretty lost navigating my new home as a

young Filipino immigrant. I’ve tried to find belonging with other Filipinos by joining

different social and cultural groups in Toronto. In Pantayo, though, I found people who are

on a journey parallel to mine, who share similar and complementary artistic practice and

aspirations, who, at the end of the day, really just want to create kulintang music that moves

us. (qtd. in Pino et al.135)

As Stuart Hall clarifies, international migration initiates a process-bound subjectivity that consistently questions the terms of cultural identity (qtd. in Rutherford 222). For second- and

79 third-generation Filipinx people, being diasporic often means animating and continuing to work through an imagined geography of home. Fantasizing a homeland presents ethical tensions and responsibilities; these psychic ties to “home” are not easily nameable, and they hold affect. In

Pantayo’s music, the dissonant frequencies produced by the mix of kulintang with harmonics deemed normative in Canada express the psycho-social conflicts presented by this hybridity. In the next section, I historicize kulintang’s dissonant sounds for both cultural identification and resistance against the anticipatory need for musical resolve. In this way, I suggest that kulintang music is queer to Western conceptions of harmony and pleasure. Pantayo’s uses of kulintang assert their queer presence on stage and within the Canadian indie music imaginary.

Kulintang: The Sound of Nostalgic Return

In a passage written in January 1776, Thomas Forrest, a navigator for the British East India

Company, describes his first encounter with the sound of the kulintang:

These instruments had little or no variety: it was always one, two, three, four common

time; all notes being of the same length and the gongs were horribly out of tune. Now and

then a large gong was struck … (t)heir ears become corrupted by such shocking

instruments. All proves mere jargon and discord. (279)

Forrest’s suggestion that the kulintang is “mere jargon and discord” is a racialized categorization based on the hegemony of tonal rules established by Western theories of music. This interpretation of sound is about the regulation of the social forms that these sounds inhabit. The psychic and social inscription of tonal hierarchies is, as I have been suggesting, culturally determined. Claiming that the epistemology of dissonance is a Western construction is to both think racially about sound and reproduce the racializing of sound.

The origins of kulintang music in the Philippines are debated. The musical practice has been archived through the observations of European colonialists since the 16th century, but its arrival and the development of its practice remain rooted in Indigenous music traditions that pre-date the arrival of Islam and Christianity in the Philippines. Some historians suggest that the bronze gong made its first appearance in the Philippines as early as the 3rd century, arriving from China during the Bronze Age. However, others believe kulintang to be derived from Javanese gong traditions, which were first developed in the 15th century, thereby contesting the narrative of its earlier arrival. Despite the debates surrounding the historical origins of kulintang, the music was developed by merging the Malay tradition of gong playing with the Indigenous music practices already existing in the area.28 Adapted by the Maguindanaon, Maranao, and T'boli peoples, kulintang has been referred to as “Moro Music,” or music influenced by the Indigenous traditions of Muslim people in the Southern Philippines. Unlike the music from the Filipino

Lowlands, where playing styles and sounds bear the trace of Spanish conquest,29 kulintang music remained resilient to colonial incursions. It is believed that the failed attempts by Spain to occupy the Moro-Muslim region of Mindanao in the 18th and 19th centuries helped to preserve kulintang as a “pre-Hispanic” or “pre-colonial” musical tradition (Jimenez). Regardless of specific origin, the sounds of kulintang are accordingly affixed to a genealogy of colonial resistance in the Philippines.

While the configuration of kulintang ensembles vary depending on region, groups are often comprised of up to six instruments, which converge around the kulintang instrument or row of gongs. This arrangement was standardized within the Maguindanaon and Maranao cultures. The

28 See Isaac Donoso Jimenez’s “Historiography of the Moro Kulintang” and Arnulfo N. Esguerra’s “From Lanao to California: The evolution of the Kulintang.” 29 For example, Rondalla, which is an ensemble of stringed instruments.

81 kulintang instrument is accompanied by the gandingan, two pairs of large suspended gongs that perform a mid-ranged pitch; the agung, two larger gongs that produce sounds in a lower range; the babandil, a gong that is hit on its rim in order to keep rhythmic time; and dabakan, the only drum in the ensemble.30 The kulintang instrument develops the melody, while the other instruments establish rhythm. The gongs do not follow a system of standardized tuning. There is no determined pitch or pitch centre used for tuning the gongs. When tuned, the instruments are adjusted to each other based on sonic relation and melodic contours. While loosely based in pentatonic scale, kulintang tuning is flexible.

In conventional Westernized harmonics where tunings are fixed and denote familiarity and digestibility to the listener, kulintang playing is less concerned with tuning and instead prioritizes the creation of melody and rhythm. The kulintang player learns sequences of basic patterns called “rhythmic modes.” Improvisation is encouraged within these rhythmic modes. The marker of a compelling performance is determined by one’s capacity to surprise the listening audience with new renditions and improvisations on these melodic patterns. Improvisation loosens the hold of what is expected; it offers a mode with which to address feelings that are autonomic and unassimilated into social interpretation. Improvisations cannot be codified, as they are unruly and allow a player to veer off structure and wholly inhabit instinct and affect. In this way, the playing of kulintang and the sounds produced through its improvisation are inherently queer.

Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantu (2005) propose that the category of “queer” must be held open to account not only for the social antagonisms of sexuality but also for the tensions that arise when the cohesion of the nation-state and its racialized foundations are contested. In this vein,

30 See Danongan S. Kalanduyan’s “Magindanaon Kulintang Music: Instruments, Repertoire, Performance Contexts, and Social Functions.”

82 and in relation to Filipinx diaspora, Martin Manalansan offers “queer” as a rubric with which to theorize “cultural dissonance” that immigrants may “experience with identity categories and cultural practices” (“Migrancy, Modernity, Mobility” 146). Extending Manalansan’s line of thought, I would offer that his notion of queer allows us to consider the musical practices of the

Filipinx diaspora (including second-generation and beyond) that account for the queerness that exists in settler-colonial contexts.

As a “pre-colonial” practice, the kulintang has become valorized among Filipinx musicians, such as the members of Pantayo, as a method of “returning” to Filipinx culture and ancestry after transpacific migration. The instruments that are a part of the kulintang ensemble offer a corporeal entry point into history and ideas of a geographic origin that have become muddied by transpacific migration and encounters in what Lisa Lowe calls “the intimacies of four continents.” Some of the members of Pantayo were born in the Philippines and some were born in Canada to parents from the Philippines. They each have unique affiliations and memories of a geography they feel tied to. Thus, in their music, kulintang gets infused with a sundry amount of affect and desires for a psychic and embodied connection to what it means to be Filipinx in the diaspora. Their sounds become a tether to the convergences of familial history, migration, and individuality. Kulintang is believed to enable them access to cultural history and meaning through the affective space of music. Mined from notions of the “pre-colonial,” these sounds are produced with the hopes of providing a distinct cultural narrative and historical coherence through generational succession. By listening to the psychic and social life of Pantayo’s kulintang, we learn how the performance of racialized sounds enable an intimacy that has never been possessed but is still desired; both a sense of belonging within the racial logics of nation- states like the United States and Canada, and an affective authority over a physical space that is lost through migration.

Writing about Filipinos living in the United States, Robert Trimillos has studied the uses of kulintang as a strategy for sustaining Filipino culture and community across borders. He observes:

The most often-expressed motivation for establishing and participating in such groups is

to maintain some part of a Philippine heritage overseas. All groups surveyed intend to

perform for Filipino and non-Filipino audiences in order to further deeper appreciation

and understanding of Philippine arts and culture. (Trimillos 12)

While kulintang provides an opportunity to assemble a sense of cultural community, Trimillos’ study also emphasizes the importance that many of the Filipinx people he spoke with placed on integration into non-Filipino communities. In order to forge a “deeper appreciation” of Filipino culture, in his account, they believed that one must be recognized by the other. Paradoxically, to be recognized means to reproduce racialized sounds that connote identifications of difference and evidence of ancestry incongruent with axiomatic whiteness. Like Pantayo’s members, I am ambivalent about such exchanges but feel hope in the potential interethnic conviviality of music- making and reception.31 Put differently, aesthetic articulations of Filipinx culture in Canada, like

Pantayo’s kulintang, hold the contradictions of what it means to be racialized amidst discourses of inclusion that demand particular performances of otherness.

The psycho-social life of kulintang, as it appears in the music of Pantayo, becomes infused with affect as it traverses borders and history. Before I conclude, I offer a critical reading of the tones, textures, and lyrics of one of Pantayo’s songs, Eclipse. As a song that exemplifies the intersections among queerness, Filipinx Canadian identity, and post-colonial subjectivity, Eclipse problematizes the assumed desire for musical consonance and assimilation more broadly. The

31 See Katharine Tyler’s “The Suburban Paradox of Conviviality and Racism in Postcolonial Britain.”

84 song opens with a steady drum machine beat. After two bars, the gandingan enters the composition with a repetitive pattern. The gongs emit a reverberating chime that moves in rhythm with the drumbeat. The synth bass and kulintang gongs then simultaneously enter the song, creating a heterophonic texture. The synth bass plays notes are anchored to Western harmonics while the gongs produce sounds that are atonal. This rub of tones exposes the ghostlike presence of musical norms while at the same time creating an “anti-repressive polyphony” that is full of queer possibility (Angermann 260). Vocals are introduced into Eclipse when Joanna Delos Reyes sings, “the sun it hits your eyes, it comes as no surprise / I can feel you / I will give this wherever it will go.” This line highlights a potent form of trust. Pantayo is entrusting the affective possibilities of music and calling out to their audiences to open new affective routes when experiencing their sound. Eclipse engenders a queer sensorial encounter that represents the complexity of being sexually and racially marginalized in Canada, replete with affect and agency. Like other songs in their corpus, the dissonance produced when combining Western and kulintang tones devaluates axiomatic desires to assimilate and produces queer feelings of belonging that are otherwise to discourses of Canadian multiculturalism.

Christine Balmes, a founding member of Pantayo, describes the kulintang as a conduit for affective belonging. She writes, “As diasporic people living in Canada and away from the

Philippines, the kulintang which is indigenous to the Philippines symbolized a key to formulating a sense of community” (qtd. in Coloma 355). The historical role of the kulintang in Filipinx social life was to gather people together in celebration and ceremony. The performative confrontations between Philippine indigenous history and diasporic subjectivity in Pantayo’s performances operationalize a psychic and multi-temporal connection to the Philippines that is appealing to diasporic Filipinx people, as is evidenced by their following. For Pantayo members, the sound of kulintang makes it possible to “feel” Filipino despite transnational migration and

85 geographic borders. Kat Estacio shares, “For us it’s important to note that our music is diasporic because we’re so far removed from the Philippines geographically” (Varty).

Conclusion

Pantayo’s incorporation of dissonance is an intentional and critical practice that locates value and representation through the refusal of monolithic conceptions of tradition and genre. In an interview with CBC Radio, Eirene Cloma discloses Pantayo’s desires to open up consideration of sonic and embodied dissonances:

I do want people to enjoy the music but also for it to serve as a medium to open up

conversations about Filipino-ness, the instruments, indigeneity. Also thinking about what

are other ways Cancon, pop music, celestial R&B can look like … I just want folks to see

that you can make music this way. You don’t have to follow a certain format. You don’t

have to be confined to a certain genre. You just have to really make it your own.

(Mahboob)

Pantayo’s music is important to me because of its steadied confrontation with a geographic home that is distanced through generations, and its enigmatic, queer excesses of sound. Like other second-generation diasporic subjects, I am the daughter of parents who migrated to Canada from the Philippines, but I am not from there; yet, I am Filipinx. I am implicated in the settler-colonial history of Canada and continue to assemble a sense of belonging from the residues of multiple histories of colonialism and disenfranchisement. I have lived with the ghosts of my parents’ past, and this unrelenting relation to the Philippines has had a disorienting impact on my emotional and psychic ties to “home.” The ghosts of my parents’ diasporic subjectivity haunt my connections to “home” and the “queer remains” (Georgis) of their experiences shape my understandings of what it means to be Filipinx in both Canada and the Philippines. Sarita See

86 argues that queerness is a “structure of feeling that is always routed through another” (106).

See’s work speaks to the historical entanglements between U.S., Canadian, and Filipino sites of empire and pushes me to question how these histories produce queer attachments to home.

Walcott posits that migrant subjectivity, in the case of second generation and after, is premised on the material reality that home is a tenuous site because “there is no place to return” (Queer

Returns 55). For Georgis, ghosts are the remainders of loss that have yet to be metabolized and

“have trouble finding their referents” (Better 11). Diaspora, she explains, is marked by a sense of

“estrangement” from origins (132). Pantayo’s music wrestles with the ghosts of diasporic lineages – lineages that are traceable to the Philippines, even though Canada is where all of the members reside. The queerness of this relation finds expression in the sonic dissonance they produce.

This chapter has offered a speculative theory of dissonant sound as it relates to diaspora. In musical terms, dissonance is understood as the absence of harmony or sound that is perceived as rough and unstable. I have proposed that musical dissonance maps onto diasporic subjectivity and that the incongruence of tones, or what I call the “queerness of notes and sound,” offers the members of Pantayo respite from the demands of normativity and the juridical force of Canadian multiculturalism. The musical and aesthetic practices of non-white communities can bring the histories of colonialism, enslavement and migration into the present in unruly and queer ways.

Important to my theorizing has been Crawley’s emphasis on how aurality and sound inform how a community shapes an understanding of itself. Crawley writes, “breathing flesh makes apparent the importance of openness, of otherwise grammars, against borders” (Black Pentecostal 59). He offers an important theoretical intervention into how the aesthetic, particularly sound and its sensual modes, announce otherwise capacities for living that break from the norm. He suggests

87 that these insurgent aesthetic practices “yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture” (4). In this chapter, I have argued that the dissonance Pantayo creates is a queer sonic because it insists on Filpinx unassimilability. Pantayo’s music refuses the distinction between harmony and discord, thus requiring a different theoretical framework with which to listen and feel its unique efficacy.

Chapter 3 Skin as Ecstatic Surface: Hearing Diaspora in the Work of Patrick Cruz

Perhaps whatever speech and writing that comes after or over a photograph or

a performance should deal with this epistemological and methodological

problem: how to listen to (and touch, taste and smell) a photograph or

performance, how to attune oneself to a moan or shout that animates the

photograph with an intentionality of the outside. (Moten, In the Break 208)

The heat was breathtaking, the sounds of traffic and people jarring and loud.

His skin hurt. (Hagedorn, Dream Jungle 138)

Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, is the currently the world’s most densely populated city and is one of sixteen cities that make up what is called Metro Manila, the National Capital

Region (NCR). With a brimming population of over 12 million people, Metro Manila is the center of the country’s economic development and urbanization. Currently the world’s most densely populated city, Metro Manila is a site where the affectual and material convergences of modern globalization, post-colonial conviviality, and the ongoing endurance of imperial conquest become undeniably entangled. Frustrated city dwellers and tourists to the capital often remark on Manila’s crisis in traffic and “state of perpetual construction” (Pido 47-48). The nation-state’s reliance on Balikbayans to stimulate the Philippine economy means that some leave and return with money to invest in properties, such as condo developments in Metro

Manila, that help to create this perpetual scenario of development. Coupled with the buy-in of foreign investors, property investment and development is at the core of the city’s rapid urbanization. With much of this investment going towards building up affluent neighbourhoods,

88 89 the poorer areas of Metro Manila are left to disintegrate, further exacerbating the class divisions and living conditions in the region (Garrido; Pido).

An urban density unlike anything experienced in Canada, Neferti Xina M. Tadiar describes

Manila as a sensorial “assault.” She suggests that Manila’s absence of geographic “contiguity” is signified through “the thickness of the city, through its crowds and traffic, its dirt and pollution, and its relentless assault on one’s senses” (292n1). Spending time in a metropolis like Manila requires what Martin Manalansan describes as a restructuring of the senses (“Immigrant Lives”).

In Manila, the colonial imprints of Spanish, Japanese, and American occupation of the

Philippines combine with the mismanagement of development to create an overwhelming sensory landscape. Manalansan insists that such sensorial intimacies graft onto how we come to know the world (“Queer Worldings”). In Manila, the sensorial encounter with colonial histories of the present (Foucault, Discipline and Punish) and the remainders of a labour export industry first instituted by the Marcos government in 1974 reveal the fraught psychic and material imbrications of a city that is consistently in the midst of a global capitalist restructuring.32

Manila’s spatial and sensorial legacies are enigmatic addresses of a colonial past that feed the exigencies of artistic production in the contemporary moment. This chapter began with the sensory onslaught of Manila to index a discussion of how art can capture the sonic legacies of time and space. Exemplified in Patrick Cruz’s painting Time Allergy (2015), the potential for a new sensorial encounter with a painted work rests in our method of encounter with the canvas as inactive object. Taking Martin Manalansan’s provocation that all senses are integral to how we understand the world seriously means that we should feel, hear, listen, and be touched by Cruz’s

32 See Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s work for an in-depth analysis on global neoliberalism’s impact on the Filipino labour industry.

90 work. I discuss two of his works specifically – Time Allergy and Plus Ultra – and I apply what

Christine Balance calls a “disobedient listening” (Tropical Renditions) practice to my readings of diasporic ambivalence in Cruz’s artistic work. Balance considers how the visual, sonic and sensational come together to defy “colonialism and imperialism’s visual regime” (Tropical

Renditions 5).

Inspired by his experience of growing up in Manila, Patrick Cruz’s painting Time Allergy aesthetically communicates the turbulent density and sensorial “assault” of the capital city.

Brushstrokes of green paint fade into blue dotted lines that meander beyond the borders of the canvas. Red, burnt orange, violet and tonal shades zigzag in abstract patterns to form what could resemble a vein structure or a messy layout of roads. Though this elaborate collection of twisted lines, colours and shapes appear seemingly disparate, the surface renders a cohesive texture. The circuitous network of colourful markings float above patches of moss green, light blue and orange. Paths of colour are abruptly rerouted – the lines and patterns are in motion; it’s difficult to distinguish where they begin and where they end. The canvas holds a frisson of embellishments that appear improvisatory yet determined to reveal a “speculative interpretation” of the artists’ interiority (Smith 46).

In Time Allergy, Patrick Cruz’s sensorial experience of growing up in Manila is aesthetically elaborated and interpreted. Approaching visual art as a medium that animates all of our senses pushes beyond the traditional function of the framed canvas as primarily an ocular engagement.

By adding sonic, psychic and epidermal considerations to the work of Patrick Cruz, my methodological orientation attempts to subvert occularcentric modes in order to offer a multisensory perspective on the dynamics of race and diasporic subjectivity. Here, this move beyond a hierarchy of senses signals a queer elision and recenters the affective circuits of

91 transference33 that move between subject and object. I describe an encounter with Cruz’s painting as a queer one because it unsettles knowledge and reconnects me to feeling that has otherwise been repressed or forgotten.

This chapter suggests that sound, in particular, permeates our skin and is thus implicated in how we come to know ourselves. I argue that the sonic contours of subject formation are captured on

Cruz’s canvas and are indicative of the interplay of senses in how we create and encounter artistic production. By de-privileging the emphasis on visuality as being constitutive of knowing,

I map out theoretical terrain with which to consider what a painting might sound like and how its sounds represent the entanglements of racialized skin, psychic interiority, and diasporic experience. These are queer sounds because they can only be felt when chains of knowledge are broken and remade with the affective and unconscious traces of the past. Drawing on Georgis’ notion of the queer remains of history, I propose that Cruz’s painting is a reparative practice not only for the artist but also for those who encounter his work. In thinking about the presence of sound in visual art, I have found that a psychoanalytic framework provides a useful route for

“sensing sound” beyond material boundaries (Eidsheim 4). This approach leads me to interrogate how a painting can capture the sounds and feelings of Filipinx diaspora. To further elaborate on this inquiry, I ask: How does sound aesthetically elaborate racial difference and diasporic ambivalence? And how can we think about diaspora as an ensemble of sounds, colours, and textures? I begin to make my case by likening the canvas to the primal resonant surface, the skin.

By building on Didier Anzieu’s notion of the “sound envelope,” I mobilize a theory of auscultative listening through which to implicate sound in the process of subject formation.

33 Transference is the unconscious projection of emotions or feelings onto the psychoanalyst or therapist. Countertransference makes reference to when the psychoanalyst or therapist projects their feelings back onto the client, potentially harming the therapeutic relationship.

Moreover, I turn my attention to the relation of skin as a conduit of sound in order to argue that like skin, the canvas is a site for generative information regarding the nuanced impacts of sound on the artist.

Through auscultative listening, I bring sound studies to bear on notions of skin, surface and queer affect to argue that when one listens to the sound of a painting, a new intimacy with the work and the artist is forged. In order to confront the convergence of the matter and affect in

Cruz’s work, I also engage with Anne Anlin Cheng’s work on the bio-political logics of the readability of racialized skin and José Muñoz’s notion of ecstatic time to theorize the material expression of Cruz’s “allergic reaction.” In Patrick Cruz’s paintings, I find an entry point into a conversation about the ethical necessity of listening to the excesses, ecstasies and unknowability of stories of Filipinx diaspora. I propose that the unorthodox mingling of sound studies, theories of diaspora, and psychoanalysis can produce theory and method for listening to the creative ways

Filipinx diasporic experience is symbolized.

Patrick Cruz is a Toronto-based artist whose work is informed by his experience of migrating from the Philippines to Canada. Reflecting on his childhood in Manila, Cruz remarks, “In a sense, I grew up in chaos” (qtd. in Zarum). He further describes Manila:

A dense concrete urban jungle with rivers of intense traffic jams amongst buildings

and advertisement billboards. Sidewalks are populated with a variety of street vendors

selling food, garments and other possible commodities that can be sold … Stray cats

and dogs can also be spotted often roaming the inner streets. The ambiance is busy,

electric and lusty. (qtd. in Whittick)

In Time Allergy, the artist’s use of vibrant colours and textured lines illustrates the temporality of said “chaos.” Movement through the streets of Manila is slow due to its swelling population and

93 uncontrolled traffic; people are slowed down by the amount of time it takes to get from one place to another. The sonic liminalities imbued by Cruz’s diasporic experience serve as important gaps that facilitate new aesthetic and discursive possibilities in representations of this city. From the delineation of a social world through his bodily experience of sound, or through his encounters with the “busy street life” of Manila, the sonic shifts inherent in matter, affect, geography and temporality are all expressed in Time Allergy.

Taking inspiration from the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, Cruz has said he is inspired by Diaz’s notion of time as a colonized construct.34 Time Allergy attempts to recalibrate expectations of time as a response to the colonial imposition of modernity. Cruz declares, “I’m allergic to modernity” (qtd. in Emily & Natalie). His “maximalist aesthetic”35 and use of abstraction play with notions of excess as paradigmatic of racialized alterity. Cruz does not express knowledge of queer theory, but his description of the non-linear temporalities of experience are in line with the field’s unmooring of temporality from normative agendas (Freeman; Halberstam; Love).

Cruz explains that Time Allergy’s “conflicting colour palette, garish application of paint, repetitive mark making and maximalist compositions … aspires to mimic the destabilizing force of modernity to reveal its symptoms and effects” (qtd. in Canadian Art). His words reveal a desire to animate the tensions of existence under colonial temporality. Cruz’s almost frenetic abstractions are representative of colonialism’s enduring assault on those who live in Metro

Manila and those who carry the city with them in memories across borders. The characteristics of his painting and the material life of Metro Manila possess a common resonance; they are both

34 Lav Diaz is best known for his work in the slow cinema movement, with his longest film timing out at 11 hours. 35 For more on this, see http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/6748038-a-maximalist-vision-of- inclusion/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2017.

94 loud and contend with colonialism’s aggressive subjugation. Of such loudness in relation to racialized subjectivity, Lucy Burns points out that brownness is often illustrated as “excessive – too loud, too bold, too much” (134). In the invocation of brownness as excess, too loud, and too present, I suggest that the dynamic force of sound is seeped into and expressed out of Cruz’s painting. If brownness is considered “too loud,” then this association is an invitation to think about the sonic and affective dimensions of Filipinx cultural production.

Auscultative Listening and Diasporic Connection

As I discussed earlier, hearing and listening are often conflated and used interchangeably. Where hearing is commonly understood as a passive engagement with sound, I distinguish auscultative listening as a deliberate act that impacts how we hear the world.36 In this way, both hearing and listening can be co-implicated in the intimate and ethical encountering of sound. Some research has been done on auscultation as a listening practice (Harris; Leder; Rice). Stethoscope listening, or “auscultation,” is the act of listening to the inside of a body. Used as a method of amplifying the quiet sounds of the body, like the heart, auscultation “involve[s] a close interplay between the senses … requir[ing] close tactile and visual contact between doctor and patient (listener and listened-to)” (Rice 106). The contact between the technology of listening (stethoscope) and the skin of the patient “produce[s] an intimate, personal, and humane … interaction” (Rice 106).

Auscultative listening requires the listener to be attentive to the sensory details of what is being listened to. In the same way a medical doctor acquires knowledge through the timbre of a patients’ chest or the speed of their heart, applying an auscultative method to visual art likens the

36 Sound studies scholars are often attentive to ambiguous distinctions between listening and hearing. For more on this, see Kara Keeling and Josh Kun (eds.), Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies; David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sound; Jonathan Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader.

95 canvas to skin in order to suggest that the ontology of a painting is a multi-sensorial and, in particular, an unfolding sonic phenomenon. With this method, I propose an ethical method of interacting with the canvas of a painting, which allows the work to be recognized as a container of psychic materials that engages a sensational mode of listening to Filipinx diasporic experience. Fred Moten’s striking meditation that “sounds gives us back the visuality that occularcentrism repressed” proposes that sound exists in the visual realm (In the Break 235).

Expanding on Moten’s thinking, Christof Migone writes, “Sound in this mode, is not only what can and cannot be heard, but also a marker of material’s irreducibility” (99). The legacy of the visual regime of perception has structured the interpretation of value through visual consumption. Bringing the sonic into the visual allows for a consideration of the politics of affect and the multiplicity of senses that resonate in aesthetic works.

Reading against the colonial impulse that renders artistic form as legibility, “the urge to see the form of the formless, and hear the sound of the soundless” is an opportunity to unsettle the ocular centric regime of sensorial knowing (Kitaro qtd. in Minh-ha 90). Trinh Minh-ha writes, “unless an image unsettles itself from its naturalized state, it acquires no resonance and is bound to remain flat – this is – unmusical hence lifeless” (92). The canvas is like the skin because it provides a separation between the self and the social world. The painting catches the exchange of inner and outer world on its surface. Minh-ha explains that “Art situated both inside and outside

‘art’ loses its fixed boundaries” (85). She acknowledges art’s capacity to create what she terms the “boundary event” (68). In art, the liminal space between events, what she describes as the

“somewhere between a sound and a silence” that is seemingly disparate, can come together to create new potentialities and ways of knowing (60). She continues:

[Art] as a (named) message it palls, passes, and perishes. As a (naming) sign,

it is the work of rhythm: breath manifested as voice, body, space. Or sound,

movement, light: the vibration of gesture – from silence; the resonance of

space – from darkness; the music of life – from stillness. The ‘frame’ is the

performance. (85)

The liminalities attenuated in Patrick Cruz’s paintings, including diaspora as a liminal space,37 insist that where paint meets canvas, where skin meets social world, and where sound meets touch elucidate the potentiality in the in-betweenness of every sensorial and material encounter.

An auscultative listening practice creates an encounter with liminality: when using this practice, one must hear both the inside and the outside of the body, past and present, as one. In bringing this practice to bear on a study of Filipinx cultural production, I suggest that methodologically, auscultative listening in the context of an encounter with art allows us to listen to the Other in an intimate and ethical relation. Through intimate contact with the skin, usually through a stethoscope, one can quite literally listen to the insides of a body. Sound studies and theories of psychoanalysis have made arguments about sound as the first encounter that inaugurates the

“self” in relation to the “Other” (Anzieu; Cheng; Schwarz). This sound constitutes a “boundary event”; a recognition of skin, a bodily surface that creates the self and the outside world. Anne

Anlin Cheng explains, “the sound that penetrates the infant is also the sound after which the infant fashions him/herself … the infant mimes the sound he/she hears and, in that act of mimicry, experiences him/herself at once possible and other” (162).

Cheng argues that sound resonates through many surfaces, including our skin, and that through the sound of the “Other” we come to recognize a “self.” Thinking psychoanalytically, sound is

37 See Delphine Fongang’s work on the politics of (re)location and the concomitant condition of liminality for diasporic subjects, or post-colonial subjects, who are always remaking their identities in relation to the transitions required in migration.

97 vibration that is felt by the whole body, and we come to know the potential for love through these first sonic encounters. What happens, then, if we think of a painting’s canvas as its skin?

How might this orientation implicate sound in artistic processes traditionally apprehended as visual? How does listening to a canvas open up a speculative encounter with the artist’s interiority? How is a hierarchy of senses queered in such a practice? In Time Allergy, Cruz stages an encounter with the canvas as a metaphor for skin in which the boundaries of spectator, artist, and canvas all come together to fashion a recognition of self and Other. Interrogating “the boundary event” in relation to sound and subject formation offers insight into how pre-symbolic and symbolic forms populate corporeality and psychic attachments.

An auscultative mode of listening occasions an encounter with what is enigmatically forgotten when one only focuses on the painted surface. Put another way, auscultative listening disallows the forgoing of the sonic characteristics of an artistic work because sound is implicated in the artists’ subject formation. Didier Anzieu’s oft-cited theories of the “skin ego” and “sound envelope” invite us to specifically think about the bodily ego in relation to sociality, corporeality and psychic space. Anzieu suggests that Western traditions have privileged the production of knowledge as a process that occurs from within, taking for granted the corporeal dimensions of the psyche. Skin, according to Anzieu, shares an inextricable relation to the ego.

Defined as “a containing envelope, a protective barrier and a filter of exchanges, as a result of a proprioceptive and epidermal sensations and the internalization of skin identifications,” the skin ego provides the foundation for subject formation and the development of an ego (23). Building on Freud’s theorizing of “primary processes,” a state of “helplessness”38 where an infant is yet

38 (Freud, 2001c, pp. 283-397.)

98 able to make distinctions between inner/outer, subject/object, and self/other, causes the infant to grapple with its reality with and through their body. The skin functions as a “surrogate ego,” where the experience of the surface of the body is used to instigate the construction of a self. For example, a newborn infant forms an impression of itself and those in relation to it through its encounter with its caregivers’ skin.

The “primary process” structures this relation, whereby the boundary between the newborn infant and caregiver is blurred by “phantasy,” or what Anzieu refers to as the phantasy of a

“shared skin” (1989 62). In this phase of development, the infant experiences itself as indistinguishable from its caregiver. When the infant grows, it gradually develops a sense of separateness through its continued encounters with the surface of its caregiver. The skin that was once shared becomes a three-dimensional container that enables the infant to discern inside from outside. Mark LaFrance explains that the severing of a shared skin allows for the infant to recognize an individuated physical and psychic self:

The rending of the shared skin is a key moment for the infant. It is this moment – when

the infant realizes that it has its own skin and, by extension, its own insides and outsides

– that marks the infant’s transition from the realm of the shared skin to the realm of the

skin ego. (24)

LaFrance further suggests that the traumatic loss of a “shared skin” displaces Freud’s Oedipal complex and its ancillary gendered and sexed essentialisms. By opening up space to imagine the relational role of embodied experience and ego formation, Anzieu implicates skin as a porous container that is both somatic and psychic. In this way, the primacy of skin allows for a consideration of how racialized subjectivity is both an epidermal and psychic state that gets

99 signified materially.39 Certainly, Cruz’s racialized skin has impacted his knowledge of self and others, and thus it cannot be uncoupled from how he expresses himself through painting.

According to Anzieu, the skin ego is shaped by all sensory experiences, including sound. Each of these sensorial encounters are formed by “psychic envelopes” that are “sensory experiences that have been transposed from the somatic plane onto the psychic plane and function as the envelopes, or skins, of the psyche” (31). The “sound envelope” is activated by the auditory sensations produced by respiration. A sense of self is given “a volume which empties and refills itself” (157). The infant’s experience of individuation is fortified by other auditory sensations like coughing or digestive activities. The auditory sensations produced by both the infant and the caregiver create what Anzieu defines as a “sound bath,” which can function as a “skin of sound” that can act as an important substitute for the skin ego. Anzieu’s theorization of the skin ego and sound envelope is a key resource to my study of the sonic qualities of visual production and perception. In his work, the communing of the social, psychic, and sonic functions of the skin provide theoretical grounding for how the psychic corporeality gets materialized on canvas. I am interested in how the sounds of Metro Manila during his childhood have shaped Patrick Cruz’s psyche and, by extension, his artistic processes. I am also interested in forging a method of encounter that can help me to hear these sounds in his work. Apart from interrogating the dynamics of skin, sound, and subject formation, I also argue that the reorganization of perceptual modes open post-colonial, psychoanalytic and sound discourses up onto new theoretical terrain that produces new ways of sensing and apprehending artistic production.

39 Hortense Spillers’ distinction of body and flesh in relation to captivity poses important critique to the political economy of embodiment. Reading Anzieu alongside Fanon’s theories of racialized epidermis would be constructive, too.

100

Fred Moten’s contributions to sound studies are an important ally to my use of auscultative listening. Moten proposes that perception often relies on an occularcentric order that occludes sound “or, more precisely, [the] impossibility – of phonic substance” (Moten, In the Break 146).

Moten writes that the spectator is influenced by “a visual code or overdetermined politics of looking that locks in a certain oppositional encounter” (191). Moten’s critical work on the logic of value in relation to black radical aesthetic traditions prompts me to ask: how can one look, listen and feel visual work like a painting otherwise? Moten deems the “freedom drive” as one that is resistant to the logics of value assigned to commodity forms including the materiality of one’s body. His work asserts that the occlusion of sound from theories of value is a racialized erasure. Citing Marx, who proposed that value is determined on the presumption of the commodity’s silence, Moten suggests that listening to the sound of an image requires an intervention, an “improvisation” on the theory of value:

This aural infusion of the visual, the very constitution of the visual in and with the

aural, each a condition of the other’s possibility, each cutting and in abundance of the

other, is, again, a theoretical disruption, the natal occasion of new sciences (of value)

given in the material inspiration of the phonically infused frame. (146)

Moten’s theorizations of black radical aesthetics help me to articulate Patrick Cruz’s work as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts neat encounters structured by the visual. Bringing a flat work into another sensorial dimension, Moten suggests, is a political act. However, this is not to suggest the act of improvisation in black radical aesthetic traditions can be cleanly written onto

Filipinx cultural production. Moten argues that the history of free jazz is not an endeavoring towards a shared utopic presence but is instead mediated by the ultimate singularity of one’s power to rewrite the structures and rules of music in real time. This articulation of singularity

101 invokes a temporality that reaches back to the traumatic sounds of slavery.40 Michael Gallope, writing on Moten, explains that “black improvisations are not simple exemplifications of rule bending, but intrinsically linked to the speculative recollection of … traumatic sound” (154).

Within jazz music, this act of improvisation is commonly referred to as the break. Moten turns our attention to the social, political, and aesthetic labour of the break, noting that it is the moment when the prevailing texture of an instrumental ensemble is momentarily interrupted by the improvisations of a soloist. In order to expand on the sonic pedagogies of the canvas, it is useful to draw a connection to literature on the break in jazz traditions. This act of improvisation has been described as “the moment of truth … it is when you establish your identity; it is when you write your signature on the epidermis of actuality” (Murray 112). In the history of black radical aesthetics like blues and jazz performance, Moten asserts that improvisation resists notions of human value related to logics of property and other forms of subjection. He writes,

“Improvisation must be understood as a matter of sight and a matter of time, the time of a look ahead whether that looking is a shape of a progressivist line, or rounded, turned” (In the Break

64). The unknowability of history, memory, absence and presence are all expressed in the act of improvisation. Moten suggests that only when one listens for the improvised will they be able hear it. I have not meant to contextualize Cruz’s use of improvisation within the history of Black aesthetic traditions to suggest they are the same, but instead hope to enliven what meanings can be expressed when improvisation is a method of creation and play. As the recorded song is a material archive of the unconscious break in blues and jazz music, I argue that Cruz’s paintings are a forgetive account of improvisation experienced by the painter. The psychic, the kinesthetic,

40 For more on the interplay of race and practices of improvisation, see The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1.

102 the ocular, and the sonic are all present in Cruz’s work, bringing together traces of diasporic history, memory and kinship that are in excess of knowability.

In Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick argues that to read from a reparative position is to surrender to the possibility that there can be “good” surprises (146). Sedgwick suggests that aesthetic experiences can help to reorient a subject towards hope. That is, art and art-making can help one transition from the paranoid to the depressive state by symbolizing a multitude of conflicting feelings, desires and temporalities. There is a possible link to be made between Moten’s insistence that we can only hear improvisation if we are open to doing so, and Sedgwick’s desire for openness to surprises. There is also a link to be made between these assertions and Cruz’s method of preparation for painting. Cruz has said that before beginning a painting or installation he prepares “in search of nothing,” playfully assembling materials and allowing for the emergence of surprise (Emily & Natalie). Thus, Cruz’s method requires improvisation. Sedgwick argues that a reparative orientation attempts to assemble “part-objects” into a whole that is not necessarily knowable or “pre-existent” (Touching Feeling 128). The psychic energy used to organize and piece these fragments together is what she calls “reparative hope” (149).

In describing the role of the unconscious in the creative process, Melanie Klein’s theory of reparation helps to explain how aesthetic representation can be a method of working through the loss of homeland. Klein’s theory of reparation, suggests Rinaldo Walcott, considers how

“separation is … often experienced by the child as a kind of violence” (Walcott, “Pedagogy” 46).

In thinking about blackness and slavery, Walcott draws a careful connection between the separation of the child from their mother/caregiver with the loss of homeland. Walcott refers to transatlantic slavery as a mechanism of forced separation; I invoke Walcott’s provocation not to align Filipinx diasporic experience with the violence of slavery but to suggest that the separation

103 from homeland is of unsettling psychic consequence. Like Walcott, Dina Georgis suggests that

“the space of diaspora is not the space of home but the space of loss of home” (“Cultures of

Expulsion”13. By imagining the canvas as a play space, I propose that through play and improvisation, Cruz symbolizes unconscious content about the loss of home – in his case, the

Philippines – in service of reparation.

Much of Patrick Cruz’s work begins with playing and improvising with materials. Expanding on the role of intuition and the unconscious in his creative process, Cruz explains why he is attracted to play:

As a ritual to start something … I just play with things. If I find a material that is

interesting to start from I begin playing with it, not really knowing what it’s for, what it’s

going to be, or what it means; it’s a means to get me started. I try to find materials all the

time, I always scavenge for stuff. (Emily and Natalie)

In her theory of childhood development, Klein suggests that play is an unconscious

manifestation like that of dreaming (Love 51). Klein’s theory of object relations

prioritizes the value of symbolic expression, particularly as a method in service of

reparation. She argues that through careful observations of children’s play, we are given

insights into the emotional economies of the child. Put another way, play is a way for

children to test out the social expression of wishes, aggression, and libidinal impulses.

Hannah Dyer notes that in observing play, Klein “was able to watch children’s phantasy

life rise to the surface” (2017). In Klien’s theory, the caregiver, in most cases the mother,

is the primal object of nourishment, identification, and meaning for the infant, and in

order for the infant to learn itself as separate from its caregiver, there must be a severing

of emotional bonds. This impulse to destroy or devour the primary object creates infantile

anxiety as a result of fear of retaliation produced by its phantasies of destruction. Also

104

concerned with the importance of play in the child’s development, D.W. Winnicott, also

from within the tradition of object relations theory, suggests that “only in play is the child

or adult free to be creative” (71). Through play, the infant can symbolize phantasies of

destruction in order to revise its relations to their origins, effectively diminishing anxiety

in service of reparation. Klein believed that reparation “includes the variety of processes

by which the ego feels it undoes harm done in phantasy, restores, preserves and revives

objects” (Envy 48). For Klein, anxiety drives symbol formation, and in the work of

Patrick Cruz, such psychic conflicts are represented as informed by migration.

Micheal de Certeau reminds us that history is made in the liminal space of what we think we know and what we forget. In the gaps and pauses of knowing and unknowing, it is possible to make new meanings and imagine new conditions for reconciling with the loss of home. Cruz’s paintings archive aesthetic and conceptual improvisations that displace sign from meaning and, in this way, forge space for the ambivalences, contradictions and liminality that contour diasporic experience. His painted lines flicker and move in different colours across each canvas.

From the shapes and abstract forms come new life and meaning. As a spectator to his artistic practice, one is witness to a performance that ebbs and flows, whispers and yells, the sounds of migration. Time Allergy, for example, is inhabited by movement and rhythm, and one cannot help but hear in his work the streets of Manila, the imbrications of colonialism, and the movement of bodies, ideas, and things across transnational borders.

Hearing Racialized Skin: Turning the Inside Out

Patrick Cruz layers the surface of his painting with the skin of the self and the Other. In an interview, he states, “A lot of the surfaces of my paintings are also found from previous artists.

Not everything, but a lot of it. The underpainting becomes the departure of the work. A little

105 window. It goes back to the idea of revealing a sense of history” (Emily & Natalie). Some of the borrowed layers of his paintings are detectable; some are completely painted over and are unrecognizable. Cruz appropriates the work of other artists as a method of beginning his own work. He identifies with his found objects to then disavow them through covering them up with his own designs. His identification with a “sense of history” hints at a psychic attachment to another time and place. I have been suggesting that this process of identification and disidentification with time and place is materialized on Cruz’s canvas and is constitutive of diasporic experience.41 His paintings contain layers of structure whose properties are projected inside in order to create something new on the outside, and vice versa. Renu Bora suggests that the exterior and interior properties of a surface are inextricable:

When a surface (a rock, or your face, for example) has certain properties, we often

project those properties into its interior, and by this interior I mean not just a cavity,

invagination, fold, or centre, but the structure, consistency, or TEXXTURE of its inner

matter that extends liminally, asymptotically, into the surface. (101)42

Bora argues that materiality is coterminous with surface and texture, and that an “inevitable tactility or human agency” is deeply connected to the occupation of physical space (101). That is, the interiority of human experience is inextricable from the outside world.

Cheng relies on Bora’s complex understanding of surfaces and the spaces they occupy to craft a theory of agency can be found in “reciprocal narratives” of materiality and subjectivity (12).

Both Bora and Cheng help me to theorize Patrick Cruz’s work as intricately woven with psychic,

41 For more on identification and disidentification, see José Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 42 For Bora, TEXXTURE refers to texture that contains information about the historical and material conditions of possibility. Bora argues structure and texture are socially constituted through ideology.

106 synthetic, and intersubjective materials. In this section, in order to engage the method of auscultative listening that is sensitive to skin as surface, as outlined above, I turn to Roland

Barthes’ use of interpellation.43 Barthes draws a connection between listening and subject formation: “The injunction to listen is the total interpellation of one subject by another: it places above everything else the quasi-physical contact of these subjects (by voice and ear): it creates transference: ‘listen to me’ means ‘touch me, know that I exist’.” (251)44 By bringing Barthes to bear on Patrick Cruz’s work, one can come to understand how the painter and the spectator share a relation that is about both their individual histories and their shared present. By attributing traces of the phonic to the visual, the injunction “to listen” is transformed as an ethical relation to the Other not solely dictated by the ear or the narcissistic need of the witness.

In Second Skin: Josephine Baker and The Modern Surface, Cheng performs a critical case study of the iconic performer Josephine Baker. She situates Baker within a history of aesthetic

Modernism in order to interrogate the politics of race and visibility emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book, Cheng refers to second skin as a “decoupling of skin from flesh … in order to attend to the curious interface between skin and inorganic surfaces” like the materials of a building or the canvas of a painting (14). She interrogates Baker’s performances in order to “delineate a history of race that forgoes that facticity of race” (14). Cheng suggests that the assumption that one can “know another” based on an encounter with their skin, the surface of their body, is reductive. Her crucial theory of “second skin” helps to undermine the knowability of racialized skin. She describes the notion of second skin as a way out of enclosure, a way outside of the politics of recognition and creates space for agency:

43 Barthes builds upon Althusser’s notion of interpellation, which recognizes subjects as implicated in ideologies that “call” or “hail” them. 44 The demand for recognition is a founding concept in psychoanalytic theories of transference.

107

When aesthetic history meets the history of human bodies made inhuman, what we

will confront may not be an account of how modern surface represses or makes a

spectacle of racialized skin but, instead, an intricate and inchoative narrative about

how the inorganic dreams itself out of the organic and how the organic fabricates its

essence through the body of the inanimate. This reciprocal narrative in turn will

radically implode the distinction of surface verses essence so central to both racist and

progressive narratives about the jeopardized black body. (Cheng, Second 12)

Cheng proposes that surfaces enact mutual fantasies. For the racialized subject, the surface can be an opportunity to “escape the burdens of epidermal inscription” (13). Her theory of second skin elucidates the potential reductiveness of aesthetic discourses that privilege the competing binaries of subject/object and modern/primitive. Her critical contribution to my theory of

Filipinx aesthetic skin lies in her rethinking of racialization, specifically imaginings of the female black body, as a known and factual surface. She highlights the interconnectedness of skin and inorganic surface in order to contest the terms of visibility.

Cheng invokes the challenge of “rethink[ing] the surfaces we believe we know too well” (1), so that we investigate significations of raced skin, challenging seemingly incontrovertible distinctions between Modern and Primitive, and expose intertwined identifications and disidentifications. Cheng’s theory of second skin elucidates what surfaces (like the canvas) cover and uncover, and implies that these investigations are fraught with contradiction and ambivalence constitutive of racialized corporeality. Patrick Cruz paints the skin of his diasporic experience, an expression of post-colonial subjectivity that cannot simply be read as an object fetishized by the white gaze of Modernity. His work exposes what Cheng terms “the shared legacy of racial formation” (13) that pushes at the potential reductiveness of the binaries of subject and object, Modern and Primitive, revealing a compelling stylization of diasporic

108 attachment. Within this framework, Cruz draws from strategies of cosmopolitan, modern art and is influenced by Manila’s urban modernity “not for disavowal but for articulation” (Cheng 13).

Thinking through Cheng’s argument about second skin and atemporality produced by unconscious acts like improvisation, I understand Time Allergy as an invitation to momentarily inhabit Cruz’s skin, a covering marked by phantasy and memory, and share in a desire to both belong and disavow experiences of identification. His work calls out for a shared aesthetic world where sites of encounter entwine with the spectator, enabling a sense of empathy, improvisation and action.

In deepening my engagement with Cruz’s practice, I return to Moten via Balance, to engage with his theory of appositionality. Appositionality is a side-step away from representation that may yield a more “genuine representation” about its conditions of possibility (Moten, In the Break,

34). Thinking through the paintings of Beauford Delaney, Moten describes how the exclusion of blackness from conceptions of the avant-garde structured how his paintings would be perceived.

According to Moten, the “merely gestural” in Delaney’s work instead points to the “irreducible phonic substance, vocal exteriority, the extremity that is often unnoticed as mere accompaniment to (reasoned) utterance” (34-35).45 Relatedly, Cruz uses methods of abstraction to situate an appositional relation to representation. His artistic works are imbued with expressive colour, collaged materials and non-figurative markings that are characteristics of modernist art.

Following Sarita See’s important work on decolonial strategies in Filipino art, I am also interested in the tensions produced by abstract art that is both praised for transcending race and critiqued for disavowing identity. Cruz is doing both. He uses a “strategy of indirection” that

45 I borrow this particular use of Moten’s concept of appositionality from Christine Balance, “Sonic Fictions,” in Tropical Renditions, pp. 53-54.

109 erases any apparent representations of his diasporic experience while expressing it at the same time (See 128). In an interview, he describes feeling in between two geographic locations:

Being Canadian has allowed me to juggle more than one perspective and it allowed me

to use an alternative lens to view life and art. It is interesting to experience two

disparate and often conflicting cultural values and the process of adapting to both

customs. (Whittick)

Here, I invoke the widely used idiom he wears his heart on his sleeve to help describe Cruz’s imagined canvas.46 His painting reveals both the interior and exterior impacts of post-colonial subjectivity and his emotional attachments to homeland. Listening to Time Allergy produces insights on the difficult task of representing ambivalent attachments to Filipino diasporic experience. What I’m trying to get at is this: when I look at Time Allergy, and of course there is bias in knowing a bit of Patrick Cruz’s biography, I read diasporic ambivalence in his work. The lines of paint and playful patterns are clear but lack clarity, the composition is chaotic but thoughtful, the materials are framed yet feel atemporal. I hear ambivalence in his work as a quality open to new contexts of becoming. Time Allergy reveals Cruz’s dream of a second skin that is at once synthetic and organic. Michelle Stephens proposes that “skin provides a boundary between self and world that serves as both an entry way to the outside world and an enclave of interior space” (1). I have suggested that that Cruz’s canvases reflect the imprint of both the outside and the interior: his memory of the Philippines and his resistance to its modernity, all coming together in slips and bursts of colour. Before concluding, I engage a recent exhibition of

Cruz’s paintings, Plus Ultra (2016), for its queer feelings and temporalities.

46 Jacques Derrida describes invagination as a process of deconstruction where the external and internal share a co-implicated relation, opening inside to outside and vice versa, challenging any stable notion of boundary. For more, see Moten’s “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In the Break, pp. 1-24.

110

The Ecstatic Surface of Plus Ultra

Patrick Cruz describes his work entitled Plus Ultra, installed at G Gallery in Toronto in August of 2016, as a landscape painting. For the installation, Cruz covered the walls and floors of the gallery in a large collection of boldly coloured acrylic paintings. The paintings, enough to almost entirely cover the space of the room, were assembled together with staples and carpet tape to create a wallpaper, seamlessly stretching across the floor to the ceiling. Remnants of the white walls and grey floor underneath conspicuously peaked through, but otherwise, the gallery bore the expressive and expansive skin of Cruz’s imagination. Reflecting on his artistic process, the artist has stated that, “Whenever I make work, I think it comes out unconsciously” (Cruz). Part of Cruz’s practice involves the repainting and reconfiguring of previous works, re-using psychic and physical materials to renarrate the future. Plus Ultra is a landscape constantly in search of renewal; to spend time in the gallery was to be introduced to a staging of work that disrupted the convention of framed paintings hung on white walls. His psychic vista is patterned in thickly lined hieroglyphs of pink, purple, and neon green, while abstract images of plants, animals and eyeballs appear on some canvases. A few meters of white wall and grey floor are left uncovered as if to set the stage for interaction with an audience. Rather than passively observe, the viewers were encouraged to step into and onto the work, becoming a part of the landscape by participating in its performance. The audience was invited to walk on Plus Ultra to both facilitate an intimate encounter and improvise a bodily relation to the work.

Plus Ultra is an example of Cruz’s insistence that an artwork is a relation between artist and audience, where the Other is invited to witness the bounded self coming undone. Moten argues that “[i]mprovisation is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation” that reveals seemingly unknowable knowledge. He

111 adds: “That which is without foresight is nothing other than foresight” (In the Break/“Not In

Between” 63). The act is a looking ahead that is “not governed by an ecstatic temporal frame”

(64). In an improvisational act, the artist (whether painter, singer, or instrumentalist) allows a mixture of conscious and psychic materials to surface that create new space for the expression of desire, attachment and loss.

In his essential work Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz’s exploration of utopic temporality closes with an invitation to “take ecstasy with me” (185). His invitation to share in ecstasy requires that one step outside of the present to experience the capacious possibilities of what he describes as the “not-yet-here” (1). Muñoz describes ecstasy as a queer temporal mode not “consigned to one moment” (25). This ecstatic temporality is gestured to in the surfaces of Cruz’s paintings. In aesthetically symbolizing the aesthetic contours of diaspora, he creates ecstatic surfaces that perform expressions of his unconscious, its atemporal dynamics, and its relation to the social world. To improvise, as Cruz does, requires allowing unassimilated materials and desires to be symbolized. Thinking through Heideggerian philosophy that suggests ecstasy carries a temporal unity, Muñoz adds that to know ecstasy is to have “a sense of timeliness’s motion” (186). This “affective transport” allows new experiences of pleasure and pain, opening up the body to an ecstatic temporality that he registers as queer

(Muñoz 186). Queerness, for Muñoz, is a relational force that steps outside of normative conceptions of time and place and is oriented towards hope for the future. Muñoz argues that queer art captures this act of “stepping out” (185). As an example, he reads Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture Saint Theresa as capturing a facial expression that connotes ecstasy. In bringing

112 aesthetic works into the study of ecstasy, Muñoz makes the important provocation that the mark of rapture remains in the materials of the aesthetic.47

Muñoz’s belief that the ecstatic is a necessary dimension of queer utopia helps me to draw a connection between queer temporality, the act of painting, and the encounter with a work of art.

Muñoz describes “ecstatic time” as “the moment one feels ecstasy, announced perhaps in a scream or grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present or future” (Cruising Utopia 32). The title of

Cruz’s work Plus Ultra, in Latin, Ne Plus Ultra, means “further beyond.” As a noun ne plus ultra refers to the highest point one is capable of reaching. Used in the 16th century as a motto of the Spanish Empire, Plus Ultra carries a queer affiliation to Cruz’s installation. The work can be understood as an attempt to materially reach beyond the colonial occupation of the Philippines by Spain. Cruz re-appropriates the Spanish motto for himself, in resistance of its colonial legacies. In line with Muñoz’s project, Plus Ultra expresses a desire to reach beyond a fixed temporality or known origin. In Plus Ultra, Cruz is reaching to symbolize his diasporic experience, while at the same time recognizing the impossibility of this pursuit. Cruz’s work asks: How do you paint the enigmatic dimensions of diasporic feelings and memory? Plus Ultra is an ecstatic surface that gives us insight into the enigmatic psychic life of the artist and is an affective archive “where the difference of being in everyday encounters is enacted in imaginative reparation” (Georgis, Better Story 144).

Like Time Allergy, Plus Ultra mimics the urban density of Manila to lure the viewer into a shared experience of displacement and connection. As if to coerce the audience into an

47 For more on José Muñoz’s work with ecstasy and how it can be marked in the aesthetic, see Shane Vogel, “Touching Ecstasy: Muñozian Theory and the Extension of the Soul.”

113 uncomfortable and unexpected collaboration, Cruz’s work insists that colonial domination creates awkward situations. Speaking at OCAD University and reflecting on Plus Ultra, Patrick

Cruz stated that “it’s kind of sacrilegious to step on a painting … it was amusing to see how an audience negotiated the space” (Cruz). Cruz has also reflected on feelings of displacement as symptomatic to his immigrant experience:

I guess my first question when I moved here was, why I was here, why did my family

move? It made me research how cultures get displaced because of economic turmoil or

other factors that play in those circumstances. These ideas have been orbiting in my

mind for a while. So when I make work, that's always at the back of my head. It’s like

a cloud that’s just looming all the time. (qtd. in Zarum)

Plus Ultra insists the audience experience feelings of displacement. Psychoanalysis understands displacement as the uncanny return of that which is repressed (Freud 1953). This dissertation makes the case that aesthetic objects are containers for artists’ psychic dilemmas and processes, such as displacement, and artwork is a symbolic expressions of that which is difficult to know and understand (Hagman; Georgis; Dyer). Plus Ultra is an archive of the artists’ history, present, and desires for the future, and through the recollection of “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 2) related to diasporic existence, openings for reparation can be made. To move through Plus Ultra is to confront his relationship to loss and migration, but also to confront his need to be present in the diaspora and even “ecstatic” about its pleasures and its estrangements.

Conclusion

Cruz believes that globalization has produced collaged ontologies. He argues that “We are all essentially collaged; a collage of cultures and histories. It’s a powerful medium. I see both my paintings and sculpture as collage” (qtd. in Emily & Natalie). The severing from homeland

114 experienced by Cruz as a child has left affective fissures, and through artistic production, he attempts to restore the lost object, to integrate and “collage” part-objects to restore a whole object that is, in a Sedgwickian sense, both good and bad. My critical contribution in this chapter hopes to offer a psychosomatic theoretical framework that draws from sound studies, psychoanalysis, and studies of diaspora to engage with the affective excesses of artistic production. Didier Anzieu’s influential work on the skin ego has been useful here. As described,

Anzieu argues that we come to know our skin through contact with the other. In this contact, the ego comes into being through the delineation of the boundaries of space. In the primal space, sound and sensation are constitutive of being. Sound resonates through the body, making the skin the first transmitter of “language and cultural systems” (Keeling 724). Like the ego, sound comes into being through the first contact with the contours of the skin, insisting that sound resonates inside and outside and is known through materiality. Art that reflects the inside and outside escapes the frame; “an image or a sound always has the potential to be other than what it is”

(Minh-Ha 92). By disrupting the visual logic often associated with encountering a painting, I have suggested that Time Allergy and Plus Ultra call for a sensually complex mode of engagement that listens to the gestural as an expression of Filipino diasporic experience.

I have inquired into the pedagogical, affective, and sensorial dimensions of encountering a painting, particularly a painting that expresses the affective excesses of migration and diaspora.

In disrupting how we perceive the aesthetic, in tuning into its multisensorial dimensions, we can hear diaspora in Patrick Cruz’s work. I have turned to José Muñoz’s theory of ecstatic time and

Fred Moten’s work on improvisation to describe Patrick Cruz’s paintings as an archive of his unconscious. In analyzing a painting, there is an opportunity to examine the complex interactions of corporeality and synthetic materials. The canvas is like the skin because it provides a

115 separation between the self and the social world, but it is also a surface onto which visual logics are written.

Gayatri Spivak insists that the aesthetic stages our “wanting” (486). The desire that characterizes our wanting infers a movement, “a directedness of a thought in the future” (Spivak 489). This direction and its psychic traces are without fulfillment and without the surety that promise will be met. However, as Spivak provocatively writes, like a “piece of elephant shit on the forest floor,” traces suggest multiple conditions and possibilities of how that piece of shit got there; nothing is definite except for the “inventory” (492). I am compelled by the inventory highlighted in both Time Allergy and Plus Ultra, and I am interested in how the gaps, silences and unknowns surrounding this inventory create new possibilities for how we understand the legacies of colonialism alongside both the banality and the violence of their contemporary residues. For

Cruz, a childhood spent in Manila forms a psychic attachment to notions of place, and in his work, the complex cartography of diaspora is recollected in his use of materials. Combining theories of listening and aesthetic experience has helped to situate painting as an aesthetic practice that uniquely touches the affective space of diasporic experience. In applying auscultative listening to the skin/surface of Patrick Cruz’s painting, one might tune into a complex interplay of objecthood and subjecthood. In the way categories of Modernism and

Primitivism teach us to see race, listening to the sonic possibilities of aesthetic surfaces teach us the infallibility of any visual certitude.

Chapter 4 Queer Affect and Modalities of Sound in Hong Khao’s Lilting

“The cessation of a sound often allows us to become aware of it afterward.” (Chion,

Audio-Vision 38)

“On this day everything stood still, even the trees have stopped rustling.” (Lilting )

Hong Khaou’s 2014 film Lilting is first a story of loss, and then, a new relation forged by sound.

Lilting offers commentary on the expressive modality of sound and the politics of language as a social signifier. In the film, mourning is depicted in the stillness of trees, the loneliness of aging, and the swollen conversations between a grief-stricken mother and her son’s lover. Chinese

Cambodian mother Junn, whose only son has been hit by a car, and the deceased’s boyfriend,

Richard, enter into a proximity inaugurated by death and punctuated by generational rifts. They do not have a shared language with which to verbalize their grief, but they eventually find a connection through the queer affect emitted in their encounters. After the untimely death of his boyfriend, Richard feels an urgent responsibility to take care of Junn. Faced with a communication barrier, Richard hires a translator to help mediate their conversations, but he soon realizes that words fail, regardless of an effort to understand each other’s language (English and Mandarin, respectively). It is only when they give up on the usefulness of words and translation that they can access the affective registers of sound that lead to reparation.

In this chapter, I argue that gaps in translation allow for a space where the sound of language is not abruptly interrupted by linguistic meaning. Applying psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious to the question of how a subject hears another’s grief beyond the confines of language, I offer a theory of mourning that is attentive to the sonic mechanisms of affect. While my inclusion of Lilting extends beyond the Filipinx-specific narratives in other parts of this

116 117 dissertation, I am compelled by its intimate portrayal of transpacific histories and diasporic parentage, which remind me of my own Filipinx familial encounters with queer love. The film helps to extend my archive deeper into representations of queer, transpacific subjectivity and is significant for its deployment of sound as affective expression. I focus on Lilting because it offers us a glimpse into how the queerness of sound brings to bear our capacity to address complex relational processes related to diasporic conditions. I begin to expand on my argument by engaging the field of queer affect. In order to make a contribution to queer theories of affect, I explore how the affectivity of sound plays an important role in shaping corporeal relations. Put differently, I address sound as a material exchange and what Nina Sun Eidshiem refers to as an

“intermaterial vibrational practice” that impacts our relations to one another (3). Privileging psychoanalytic theories of the antinomy between the sound of the voice and semantics, I suggest that the rush to translation collapses difference and too quickly interprets queer affects, instead pushing feeling into the representational economy of language.48 My analysis also centers critical theories of race and sound studies for their ability to convey the complexity of grief that underwrites the film’s plotline.

Lilting tells the poignant story of how individual experiences of racism, homophobia and loss commune in the aftermath of an untimely death. The film ruminates on the psychic contours of grief by focusing on the lives of those who have been left behind. Set in the U.K., the film offers a complex protagonist in Junn, a mother who struggles to connect with her deceased son’s

48 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922/1989), Sigmund Freud makes a correlation between silence and the death drive. Freud argues that “[t]he death drive instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively” (Beyond 338). He goes on to argue that the drive towards life and the desire to survive is fueled by Eros. This dialectic is emboldened by its sonic distinctions. Freud writes, “[t]he death instincts are by their nature mute…the clamour of life for the most part from Eros” (Beyond 387). Within this binary, he presents a sonic tension; the death drive as silent and Eros as full of sound.

118 partner, Richard. After migrating from Cambodia and later moving into a nursing home in

London, Junn relied on her son, Kai, to help her navigate the cultural barriers brought on by her migration to the U.K. After Kai’s death, Junn faces the reality of being alone in a world that feels overwhelming without the company and help of her son. Richard forges a presence in Junn’s life despite believing that she is unaware of his love affair with Kai. Knowing that Junn is struggling to adapt to life on her own without the aid of her son, Richard is committed to helping her find stability and pleasure in her new relationship with a man who lives in her nursing home. He hires a translator to help mediate their communication, assuming that translation will assist in concretizing their romance and therefore providing stability and support for Junn. Junn is frustrated by Richard’s insistence, however, which is further complicated by their racialized dynamic. Junn struggles with the racialized legacies of migration that include the pressures to assimilate and learn the English language, while Richard is weighted by the threat of her potentially homophobic response and disappointment to his relationship with Kai. Throughout the film, we are witness to the re-appearances of difficult feelings associated with these sites of non-belonging.

This chapter turns to Lilting for its assistance in theorizing the relationship between queer affect, grief and sound. I draw on sound studies (Eidsheim; Kapchan; Stoever) and theories of queer affect (Bradway; Chen; Georgis) to analyze Lilting and describe its socio-political importance to conversations surrounding the representability of grief. Attempting to grieve their loss together requires hearing each other’s voice, despite a lack of shared language. The film ebbs and flows between past and present, blurring the temporal frame of life before and after Kai’s death.

Cinematically lush, the backdrops are highly aestheticized, with pastels of pink, blue and purple thematically tying each scene together. Especially salient to my dissertation is the film’s mobilization of sound to illustrate the affective residues of grief. Junn is grieving the loss of her

119 son and Richard is grieving the loss of his lover, and the commonality of their loss is beautifully rendered through the film’s soundtrack. By becoming attuned to the feelings that undergird the sound of their voices, both characters are able to recognize their shared love and devastation over the loss of the same man.

In the field of sound studies, the sonic is a conceptualization of sound that is contingent on both its cultural-material understandings and its relational contexts (Gerloff and Schwesinger). The metaphorical uses of sound can offer a mode of expression and interpretation with which to describe social life. Metaphors related to hearing and listening can work to reveal sound’s vested complicity with interpersonal dynamics. For example, to “hear” or “listen” creates an opportunity to recognize a person’s “subjectivity, just as to “have a voice” suggests … a manifestation of internal character” (Novak and Sakakeeny 2). To this end, this chapter considers the reparative work of sound, as both psycho-social material and metaphor, in the aftermath of trauma. The vibrations emitted by the sound of Lilting’s character’s voices reorient their capacity to be touched by one another, and so they learn to listen to each other’s grief for its aporetic qualities and its commonality. The sonic quality of their encounters exhibits a queer modality that does not adhere to the conventional logic of language.

Lilting offers a deeply moving depiction of what I have been defining as the queerness of sound.

In the film, Richard’s and Junn’s reactions to the death of their loved one animates queer affect through the sonic, or what I call queer sonics. Queer sonics are sounds that cannot otherwise be adequately circulated in the social world. Drawing on Georgis (Better Story), these sounds contain queer affects, which are otherwise repressed or the cause of shame. In elaborating the concept of queer affect, Georgis’ theorizing helps me to make the case that the excesses of desire are passed through the social and resurface in surprising ways. Transposed to the site of grief, the

120 queer affects of loss return us to another place and time so that the present is better understood.

Lilting cinematically represents the non-linear workings of grief, and here I argue that sound is uniquely imbued in the film’s representation of these fragmented temporalities.

Racialized Sound and Its Agentic Capacities In an interview with the film’s director, Hong Khao reveals that the film is less about a plot and more about the emotions that reside in each character.

I wanted to think about the emotions as a theme more than focusing on plot. Emotion

is a language. Therefore, one of the things I was exploring was communication.

Communication brings back understanding and acceptance and bridges cultural

differences. Equally, it highlights differences so strongly that it can even cause

conflict. Thinking about communication and language, emotion is very much a

language that’s transcendental. It’s a universal thing. You don’t have to learn that

language. Emotion is a language we can all pick up in a very intuitive way. (qtd. in

Aguilar)

The director’s impulse to focus on the communicative capacities of emotion is closely linked to his own autobiography, in which the sound of language was a demarcation of his racial and ethnic difference; a cultural marker his mother refused to alter in herself. Having migrated to the

U.K. in 1983, Khaou’s family left Cambodia after the takeover of the Khmer Rouge. His mother continues to refuse to learn or speak English. Speaking about his mother, Khao has stated she

“hasn’t fully assimilated, and when I was younger I struggled with that. It was only as I got older that I realized the sacrifices my parents had made” (qtd. in Black). Under Margaret Thatcher, immigration policies discouraged Asian refugees from settling in the same vicinity; isolated from other Cambodians, Khaou’s family were the only Asians living in his neighborhood. Khaou’s

121 parents were left to build a life in an unfamiliar country without the aid of a network of friends or cultural community.

Similarly, in Lilting, Junn has lived in London for decades, does not speak English, and is without friends and extended family. Her resistance to “assimilation” should not be aligned with ignorance, but rather should be considered a response to her (and the director’s) complex proximities to racism, war, and the legacies of Thatcherism. She is estranged from the predominance of English that imbues her interactions in the social world and had relied on her son, Kai, to help bridge her gaps in understanding. Lilting offers an occasion for thinking about what abjected traces of migration, racism, homophobia and loss are captured in the sound of one’s voice. Against and beyond linguistic meaning, the film provides insight into the affective utility of sound as a space that registers and produces racial boundaries in everyday life.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever writes that sound is “a critical modality through which subjects (re) produce, apprehend, and resist imposed racial identities and structures of racist violence …

[S]ound has served as a repository of apprehension, oppression, and confrontation, rendered secondary – invisible – by visually driven epistemologies” (4). Stoever’s oft-cited theorizing of the “sonic color line” examines the racializing of sound as constitutive of a hierarchy of social expectations and regulations placed on particular bodies.49 Drawing from a rich archive of Black cultural production, Stoever suggests that race is fundamental in determining what kinds of listening and sounding can occur in particular spaces and places. She makes clear that discourses of race and racism have relied on the visibility of race as enabling the discernment of racial

49 Stoever draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’ fundamental theorizing of double consciousness, or the sense that one’s perception of self is developed through the eyes of others. In particular, Stoever highlights how Black subjects negotiate processes of racialization through and between their encounters with listening and language.

122 identities. However, Stoever suggests that the sonification of racially coded phenomenon such as accents, musical tones, and styles further reveal the socially constructed boundaries of sound, which produce and enforce racial hierarchies.

In Lilting, the aurality of race is elaborated in Junn’s everyday encounters and, specifically, in those that transpire with her son’s lover. For example, the tensions between Junn and Richard escalate when Richard emphatically announces, “If you hadn’t been so dependent on Kai he wouldn’t have had to put you in here … if you had adapted to this culture, Kai wouldn’t have had to look after every facet of your life.” In this short scene, an explicit aural boundary is reified that aligns English with whiteness, respectability, and, within the narrative of Lilting, the preventability of Kai’s death. Junn’s refusal to adapt and speak English illuminates sonic protocols that distinguish language as an aural marker that locates difference and racial alterity in the migrant body. In this moment, Junn is explicitly aware of her difference but also resistant to assertions that the English language would correct it. While describing her initial experiences of migrating from Cambodia to the U.K., she remarks, “Five years pass and suddenly we’re English people, but I’m not English.” The sounds and silences that Junn embodies are antithetical to the demands of the state. They are what King-Kok Cheung terms “enabling silences,” because they make notice of the spaciousness of narrative gaps in translations of Asian women’s experiences.

Though sound, in the form of language, functions as a regulative process, Junn’s accent and her refusals to speak English also invoke sonic forms of agency, self-care, and survival. Stoever interprets these incommensurabilities as examples of a form of resistance embedded within racialized listening practices. She writes, “In order to have the rights and privileges of national citizenship and at times, shockingly, to be considered human – one has to listen similarly to power: valuing the same sounds in the same ways and reproducing only certain sounds the

123 listening ear deems appropriate, pleasurable, and respectable” (Stoever 19-20). Junn believes, though, that her language protects her, that in it she can speak more adequately and without the threat of a painful rebuttal. Speaking about her boyfriend, she states, “I can say anything and he doesn’t answer back. I can talk rubbish and he still thinks I’m an exotic beauty.” This line highlights how a disjuncture in language comprehension produces an alternative space where the marginalized find possibilities to resist and talk back.

The Sonic Frequencies of Queer Affect

In Lilting, the sound of memories, quiet rooms, and music that provokes bodies to tremble with sadness opens up an analysis of the queer temporalities of grief through which the story is told.

The temporal openings deployed by the filmmaker make possible a queer transfiguring of time.

Here, grief relies on the representation of time as incumbent of many versions of the past and present operating simultaneously, asynchronously, and over multiple temporalities. Nguyen Tan

Hoang suggests that queer temporality forces consideration of “how queer experience gets transmitted from one generation to the next, a process that exceeds, in innovative ways, the heterosexual kinship/reproductive model” (qtd. in Dinshaw et al. 83). Through the temporal fissures built into the film’s visual and sonic cues, Lilting captures relationships that span generational time and those which are also in excess of it. Kai, the deceased son of Junn and once boyfriend of Richard, haunts the film. Representations of the past resurface within multiple temporalities in the present; Kai returns to scenes cast in the present in order to collapse linear temporal progressions. Through the deployment of queer temporalities built into the film’s narrative, the potential for a reparative relationship is forged between Junn and her deceased son’s queerness. Furthermore, the restaging of the past allows for Junn to remake her relation to the future, which may or may not significantly alter her homophobia but does offer a more

124 healing account of how her son was deeply loved and taken care of by his partner, Richard. The temporal openings of the film allow for intimate encounters with the trauma and grief of death, and in this imaginary space, an opportunity to mourn is forged.

In The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East, Dina Georgis offers a theorizing of affect that is useful to my consideration of how sound comes to bear on experiences of loss. As

Georgis explains, belonging to the social world comes with an expectation to abject or disavow queer affect. When language becomes an inadequate discursive structure for difficult experiences like trauma, our orientation to the past jostles between the fictions of what we know and what we’d like to forget. Queer affect enables confrontation with “the painful ghosts … [and] the invisible matter of history” (Georgis 10). In Georgis’ formulation, ghosts are dangerous psychic and emotional remnants of the past that are too difficult to name or narrativize. We rush to dispel these ghosts from our histories as they hint at unbearable truths, but as Georgis suggests, these ghosts surface through affect. When we come into contact with queer affect or the ghosts of socially aberrant desires, we access the possibility of telling “a different story” about traumatic histories (Georgis 11).

My argument about the strength of Lilting rests on the notion that the sonic holds space for what would otherwise be abjected. That is, drawing on Georgis, the sonic enactments that occur between people and objects hold space for queer affect. Put differently, when sound is formatted into speech and language, it is transduced within cultural infrastructures to create “sonic events” that are imbued with epistemic impact.50 However, I argue that when sonic formations are

50 Felix Gerloff and Sebastian Schwesinger write, “According to Foucault’s notion of the dispositif all expressions and manifestations that are produced within a certain epistemic ensemble of apparatuses,

125 unidentifiable (when language is spoken but not understood by the listener) the queer affective traces of sound are given more room to resonate. Building on this line of thinking, my reading of

Lilting suggests that queer affect offers a mode of thinking with which to conceptualize sonorous forms of abject produced by the body that escape social sanction. At the core of Junn and

Richard’s relation is unspeakable grief, and the unsayability of homophobia and racism that undergird their subjectivities. Junn and Richard re-make their relationships to themselves and the dead by learning to symbolize grief beyond the boundaries of the linguistic. They both deal with unimaginable pain associated with death in their own ways, often meeting each other in silences, abbreviated thoughts, and frustration over the difficulty of locating mutually recognizable words.

In their persistence to communicate despite a language barrier, the sound emitted by their bodies creates conditions for a deeper understanding of each other’s loss and grief.

Georgis suggests that the loosening of queer affect creates “an incitement to new beginnings from the site of queer loss and an ambivalence to security” (Better Story 14). Drawing on Julia

Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity, which argues that the self is produced through the relinquishment of the incest tie, Georgis suggests that language and symbolic order is “an achievement of that loss” (14). We forego pleasure that exceeds the logic of social order in place of social ties. As I have been arguing throughout this dissertation with the help of queer theory, queerness should not simply be conceptualized in relation to identity but also for its potential to theorize that which is in excess of social sanction. Thus, queer affects do not necessarily refer to sentiments or feelings belonging to LGBTQ people (though, surely, we have a lot of them);

juridical orders, infrastructural configurations, discourses, bodily imaginations, etc. delineate the field of possible knowledge and thinking (Foucault 1978) and should be taken into account accordingly” (92).

126 instead, they are affects that resist teleology and “knowability” (Georgis xi). Queerness can be located in the affective jolt resultant from the surprise of an abjected desire. In this way, my thinking about the queer sonics of relationality is imbued with a history of queer theorizing that considers “queerness” as loosened out of the holds of identity (Jagose; Love; Ruti).

Through a psychoanalytic lens which privileges object relations theory, Georgis offers a description of queer affect as that which is “in excess of what we think we want and think we care about, or in excess of the things we normally would find disgusting” (Better Story 15). In this way, queer affect is that which eludes the social symbolic and unsettles our sense of self.

The social demarcation of abject bodies such as the homeless person or sex-trade worker,

Georgis suggests, function to consolidate identity as the desire to ward off abjection and reinvest in identity’s social meaning. It is through queer affect that we return to sites of abjection or, according to Georgis, to what horrifies us. Thus, queer affect eludes decorum and returns “in the form of a surprise or … an unintelligible protest from within the self” (Georgis, “Discarded

History” 160). From within this framework of thinking, my use of queer implies the relational, as it is through the other that “we give up antisocial or presocial carnality for social relationality”

(Georgis, “Discarded History” 160). Queer affects, Georgis suggests, interrupt causal logics and habitual social markers in favour of carnality; a foregoing of temporality or a submission to our abjected desires and “forgotten dependency on the other” (Better Story 16). As Georgis explains, queer affects loosen our sometimes-unbearable desires to depend on each other for security and belonging.

Between Junn and Richard, queer affect circulates and is emitted in the sonic spheres of their relationship. Despite not speaking the same language, the sounds that move between and around them (e.g., crying, shouting, arguing) evoke a sonic frequency that offers an alternative form of

127 contact. In the closing scene of Lilting, Richard hands off a box filled with Kai’s belongings to

Junn. She has arrived at Richard’s apartment with a translator named Vann, who has been hired to translate Richard’s words to Junn. For Richard and Junn, the translator functions as a screen that defends against listening to each other’s grief. After a string of tense encounters weighted by the barriers of language, cultural difference, the grief of Kai’s untimely death, and the secrecy of

Richard and Kai’s relationship, in this scene, Richard and Junn share a moment of connection.

Sitting face to face, Richard reveals that Kai was gay and that they were together for over four years. Junn turns to Vann, the translator, to receive the translation.

Richard proceeds to painfully recall that on the day of his death, Kai was planning on telling

Junn about their relationship. Richard begins to weep as he narrates Kai’s plan to tell Junn that he was gay. Vann has yet to deliver the translation when Junn begins to address Richard. It appears as though Junn reaches for Richard’s hand, but the act is out of the camera’s frame.

Speaking in Mandarin, she reveals the root of her contempt for Richard. Junn states, “It’s pathetic for a mother to fight for her own son’s attention. I felt so jealous of you.” They continue to share their feelings of loss and regret without the use of the translator. Their gazes towards each other soften, and Junn begins to slowly nod her head in recognition of Richard’s pain.

In this scene, there is a communing of emotion that exceeds the knowability of language and released queer affect. Junn and Richard listen to each other’s pain with all of their senses, temporarily releasing the social structures that secure their resistances to vulnerability. The affective registers of sound translate feelings rather than words, and thus they engender a deep resource of empathy and connectivity. The cessation of translation invites us to feel the textures of their exchange, and we are witness to the sonic expression of grief captured in bated breath, the sound of fluttering eyelashes coated in tears, and trembling bodies incapable of digesting the

128 pain of loss. Foregrounded here is what Airek Beauchamp deems a “synesthetic vibration” or

“sonic trembling.” Beauchamp emphasizes the body’s production of sound as a site of materiality that exceeds “patriarchal structures of language” (Beauchamp) Sonic tremblings,

Beauchamp suggests, are “always intersectional, encompass past lived experiences, social and cultural constructions that restrict interpretation, and interpretations falling outside of social or cultural codes” (Beauchamp). In this way, the body perceives the affective registers of sound destabilizing the pervasive rule of language. Richard and Junn cannot know the depths of each other’s grief, but they forge empathy through sensing the synchronous qualities of their affective vocalizations.

“Felt Sound” and Material Vibrations

Important to my interpretation of the film is the embodied materiality of sound and its potential to symbolize loss through vocalization. Many of the most generative thinkers within the field of sound studies have considered how the body is implicated in the perception of sound (Blackman;

Eidshiem; Goodman; Henriques). Deborah Kapchan describes the corporeal sensing of sound as

“a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening” (34). Kapchan is concerned with uncoupling the robust binaries of the Enlightenment, which privy the sensibilities of language over what she describes as “sound knowledge,” or an awareness of the perceptibility of the body. In this way, sound can also be understood as vibrations that shape corporeal sensations. Michael Gallagher conceptualizes “sonic affect” as an “intensity that moves bodies”

(43). Acknowledging the body’s sentient perception of sound also implicates a relation to the act of listening.

David Samuels and Thomas Porcello suggest that when language is simply defined as conceptual substance it is often disassociated from “the mechanisms of its material embodiment as socially

129 circulating sound” (87). They propose that the study of discursive functions of language have often emphasized its “cognitive properties at the expense of its sonic enactments” (85). The separation of sound from language can interrupt acknowledgement of its sonorous expressivity and affective dimensions. Giving adequate attention to language’s affective dimensions requires attributing communicative value to non-linguistic vocalization. In this way, sound can be clarifying without the need for understanding what is being said. This approach allows sound to manifest as oscillating vibrations not weighted by meaning but instead existing as a sonic conduit that holds space for healing across difference.

In Lilting, sound functions as aesthetic expression precisely because of the suspension of meaning from words. For Junn, speaking her language to others gives an authorial charge created by this antinomy. Affect that is attached to the sound of words and not to their meanings causes

Junn to feel a queer relation to others. She is both abject and object of desire for the ways that she sounds, and because her lack of English allows multiple projections to be written onto her body. Relatedly, the sound of Richard’s voice apprehended from its linguistic meanings demarcates a liminality in which Junn receives a sonic impression and not its intended identification. The disruption of identification inverts meaning and is indicative of what Michel

Chion (2016) refers to as the “ambiguity of audition” (Sound 12). That is, no matter the sound or intended meaning, the listening subject is open to a miscellany of interpretations.

The epistemic embrace of ambiguity has also been used as a mechanism with which to consider sensation and “flesh” as a valuable method of inquiry. Merleau-Ponty importantly emphasized the relation between ambiguity and notions of sensation, attributing importance to the body’s capacity to touch and be touched (31). For him, the sensitization of the body offers other ways of intimately relating outside of rationale and reason. In Lilting, sound creates a queer temporality

130 in which Richard and Junn forge methods of communicating that highlight the haptic qualities of sound and their material force. Though I value the ways in which sound has been used as a metaphor to signify the ways in which the sonic extends across the philosophical, the materiality of sound emphasizes its concrete expression. To say one hears another’s story or listens to the voice of marginalized people can be a powerful political and empathic expression of care. But here, I am more interested in the act of listening beyond metaphor and as a material specific dynamic emitted through frequencies that Campt refers to as “felt sound.” Campt’s discussion of

“infrasound” as frequencies that are predominantly felt through vibrations by the body helps to describe sound as more than what is perceived by the ear. Furthermore, the material qualities of sound have specific physiological impacts on the body, affecting “blood circulation, skin resistance, muscle tension and respiration” (Recuber qtd. in Vincze 110). “Felt sound,” as a form of affective encounter, contours how Richard and Junn come to form empathy towards one another’s grief, thereby creating recognition of their shared love for the same man.

Theorizations of sound have taken seriously the phenomenological, affective and multisensorial dimensions of sonic perception and interpretation. Sound produces vibrations that can be sensed by the body; it extends into the relational and affects social encounters (Campt; Eidshem;

Chion). David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny suggest that “sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality” (1). Sound has been defined as a physical form; it is the compression and rarefaction of matter that moves in audible waves of pressure through bodies and objects. The material production of sound in the form of the sound wave has been interrogated for its tangibility. The mechanical vibrations produced by an object cause oscillating waves, which are then mediated by a solid, liquid or gas through which the wave travels. The soundwave is a transfer of energy that moves away from a vibrating source. Sound, according to

Edward Branigan, “rubs against and within us” (42).

131

The sound being exchanged by Junn and Richard can be understood as a transfer of “queer” vibrations that resists measurable dimensions. Richard and Junn cannot rely on semantics to help shape their interpretations of each other; instead the sound of language becomes an affective medium from which they must derive understanding and begin to mourn.

Nina Sun Eidsheim theorizes music and sound as “transferrable energy” (16). Attention to the materiality of sound, or what Eidheim describes as the “pulsating through and across material,” routes the conception of vibration across multiple theoretical and sensorial trajectories (18).

Music, according to Eisheim, can be conceptualized within a paradigm of sound that is circumscribed by knowable parameters such as length, pitch and duration. Alternatively, if understood in terms of vibration, these parameters become unbounded. Within this framework, sound resists knowable definitions and insists on a “dynamic, shifting process of transmission”

(Eisheim18).

As audience to the characters’ exchange of queer vibrations, it is hard not to be affected. For example, in an argument with Richard over the possession of Kai’s ashes, Junn shouts in Chinese and Vann translates, “You have a house filled with his things … why won’t you let me, her, have his son’s ashes?” Richard rebuts, “I want to scatter them somewhere, and I think Kai would like that.” Junn appears stunned as his words are translated back to her. When they raise their voices in frustration towards each other, greater energy is expended, and this creates more vibrations or stronger amplitude, which then results in an increase in volume. The greater intensity signifies a charge in emotion, which is then immediately translated into language. However, the interventions of the translator act as a screen, displacing potential recognition of their shared grief. In Lacanian terms, translation functions as a signifying operation through which the voice

132 becomes absorbed into networks of meaning.51 Without translation, voice is differently absorbed in the social world. So, rather than rushing to defend against the other’s words, when translation is withheld from Junn and Richard, they are given an opportunity to glimpse at what Georgis describes as the ineffable dimensions of grief.

The notion of queer sonics offers a mode with which to address the felt impact of sounds that resist fixed networks of meanings. Sound’s capacity to spread is unbounded and it holds “elusive and diffuse character” (Stoever 4). Paul Simpson suggests that despite its varying perceptibility, sound is inherently relational, it “takes place somewhere, at some time and at certain (in)audible frequencies” (91). Historically, sound has been understood to be contained within a history of defined referents. However, when social signifiers are unhinged from their points of reference, the queerness of sound might be both heard and felt.52 The complexity of sound provides an entry point to consider what constitutes sonic perception. A turn to sound as a modality of queer affect reveals the “unrecognizable desires” emitted by the sonic (Georgis, Better Story 15). Only when Richard and Junn are left with the sound of words are they able to listen ethically to one another.

Foregoing semantic language, the sound of Richard and Junn’s voices can symbolically elaborate the pain of loss, racism and homophobia. Because they do not speak the same language, without the threat of knowable symbolization, they are able to learn to listen to the queer affects that are indicative of their shared pain and suffering. In the film, both characters slowly learn to withdraw from the demands of language in order to collaborate on a process of grieving that does

51 See Dennis Porter’s “Psychoanalysis and the Task of the Translator.” Comparative Literature, vol. 104, no. 5, 1989, pp. 1066-84. 52 For example, Nina Sun Eidsheim considers a vibration theory of music to analyze the idiosyncratic temperaments of sound. She focuses on modes of voicing as sites of knowledge production.

133 not press cultural and semantic knowledge onto their relation. In Listening to Images, Campt creates a method of listening to the photographic archives of Black people throughout the black diaspora that is attentive to sound and affect. She recalls the memory of her father’s “quiet hum”

(3). Describing the multitude of feelings and temporalities connected to the memory of that sound, Campt refers to it as “an exquisitely articulate modality of quiet – a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance”

(4). Campt’s reflections on the politics of “quiet” provides a template for thinking about the generative space of sonic imperceptibility. Her work cautions against the conflation of silence and quiet, as “quiet registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention” (6).

Through conceptualizing sound as an affective register that exists within multiple temporalities,

Campt makes meaning from its queer associations. Perhaps, the sound of a language that one does not understand is experienced as a hum that is open to interpretation in the realm of feeling.

When we rush towards understanding another without attending to the specificity of what they are saying, we risk narcissism and foreclose difference (Simon; Georgis). Drawing on the work of Deborah Britzman, Georgis argues that in order to “ethically learn” from an other, one must occupy a “state of humility and curiosity” unobstructed by defenses and ego boundaries (Better

Story 18). Georgis proposes that “ethical listening” requires a relinquishment of the impulse to control what is being experienced. An ethical listener, Georgis advocates, is “neither disengaged nor wanting to master what it sees and hears” (18). Rather, the ethical listener does not fend off witnessing the pain of an other, but instead allows the borders of their ego to be touched by that which they fear may cause them injury.

Queer affect, as I have been describing it, turns against the rationale of language and returns us to a primal, non-linguistic state that wards off desires for security induced by promises of love,

134 community and the sense of belonging. Paradoxically, Georgis clarifies that when queer affect unsettles our social identities in favour of our presocial bonds, we become aware of the role of collectivity in creating the conditions for healing. The act of translation reinvests in the role of language as constitutive of social ties. The presence of Vann secures the boundaries and

“habitual social relationalities” that underwrite Richard and Junn’s tense relationship (Better 15).

When the translation between language pauses, Junn and Richard become attuned to the communal dimensions of their queer affects of loss. They create an opportunity to be touched by each other’s injury (Georgis and Kennedy22), and for a moment, they rewrite their relationality.

An accumulation of frustration has been built between Richard and Junn, and in this scene, the interventions of the translator and the pressures of saying the right words are productively quieted.

Conclusion

In an interview, Hong Khaou explains the title of his film: “Lilting means to move toward something rhythmically. I know it’s a word we don’t often use but I really love the way it sounds

– sort of onomatopoeic. There are a lot of elements in the film that reflect the idea of lilting: the language, the movement of the camera, the tone” (qtd. in Black). The meaning of “lilting” functions in this story as a thick metaphor that collates the materiality of sound and its potential to harness unpredictable social intimacies across devastation and difference. Junn and Richard learn to move towards each other in grief. In line with Khaou’s statement, Lilting, I have suggested, is a symbolic resource for considering what meanings can be made from discursive gaps in communication and understanding. This chapter has reflected on Lilting’s “enabling silences” (Cheung 20) and has suggested that the film’s rendering of affect that exceeds words actively forges new familial and cross-cultural relations and intimacies. Without the demands of

135 semantics, a pause in translation allows both Richard and Junn the opportunity to feel a shared relation to the dead. I have advanced my arguments by theorizing the relationship between loss, queer affect, and sound.

My analysis in this chapter considers the sound of language as a space that holds queer affect.

Transposed to the film and its sonic representations of grief, queer affect is specifically located in the vocal exchanges between Richard and Junn. In order to make my case, I explored the role that sound plays in forging a deeper understanding of loss that ultimately results in a reparative encounter between the two characters. I have proposed that the interactions between the mother and her son’s lover resonate with quiet frequencies, creating an invitation to “ethically listen” to the psychic and haptic vocabularies of grief. I have read Lilting as a site for the development of queer identification that opens up the potential to, as Georgis puts it, “be affected” by that which unhinges us.

Underneath and also central to my inquiry has been a consideration of the multiple uses of silence that occur within queer and racialized diasporic familial interactions. Lilting leads its audience to ask: What norms of “being out” discipline understandings of silence and communication? The film asks its audience to carefully and ethically attend to those instances where it is the oscillating intensities and queer vibrations of the voice, rather than the linguistic signifiers, that allow connection with others. I have inquired into the sonic possibilities of affect in Lilting, and I have proposed that it contains a modality of sound that gestures towards social and psychic repair.

Conclusion Sounds that Linger, Sounds that Queer in the Pandemic

To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it Down a well, listen. Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference Shatter. (Anne Carson, 2000)

Someone is playing the trumpet from their balcony as I write. The timbre of each note floats lazily into the thick of a grey sky, but upon conclusion, each song is met with applause from people gathered on their balconies. When a virus strips a city of its mundane grooves and vibrations, the sound of a trumpet’s hope is deceitful. The apartment balcony has become the stage; a square footage of concrete that institutes the possibility of being sonically intimate.

Listening to the trumpet, I am reminded of all that is good, hopeful and devastating in this moment of imposed isolation. The trumpet, and its reception, is not a sound that requires the function of aurality; instead, it is something to be sensed by the whole body. Today, this sound shatters and fills me with equal parts sadness and optimism.

I have concluded this dissertation in the midst of a global pandemic. As I write, my two-year-old son is napping upstairs with my partner; after a dark winter, the sun is finally shining in the city of Toronto, and in a cruel turn of fate, we have all been advised to stay indoors. The threat of the virus called COVID-19 has caused the federal government to institute a state of emergency.

Medical experts and government officials have pleaded with the public to create “social distance” from one another in order to curb the spread of the deadly virus. Posing a serious threat to the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, such as those who are immune compromised, the aging population, and the homeless, COVID-19 has forced me to consider how we become in relation to one another without physical proximity. The Filipinx child who

136 137 used technology to sing to her mother from an Internet café in an effort to offer her a sonic expression of care offers some ideas. If, in this moment of pandemic, creating social distance is a gesture of care towards others, what creative acts are being summoned to muster a sense of hope and collectivity while in isolation? I’ve been struggling to find words and theory with which to make sense of our contemporary moment, where a lack of equity already woven into the fabric of our culture has been laid bare to some who would have otherwise ignored it.

I’ve been avoiding confrontation with the impending deadline of my dissertation’s conclusion because I’ve been convincing myself that there are more important things to be worrying about.

However, in this moment, only now does my research have the explicit clarity and urgency I’ve been seeking. Sound, in many configurations, is what has defied the rules of quarantine. Breath, as Ashon Crawley describes, is central to the performance of music, and it should be noted that a major force of the virus is its impact on one’s ability to breathe. From balcony opera performances in Florence, Italy, to recitations of Biggie Smalls’ “It Was All A Dream” from apartment windows in Brooklyn, New York, to the banging of pots and pans to show solidarity with health care workers in Vancouver, Canada, and to the creation of virtual dance parties like

“Club Quarantine” and “E-Papi,” where queer and trans people virtually gather from all parts of the world to dance and socialize, the affective and material resources of sound have helped to forge intimacies across imposed borders and separation. Indeed, sound and its vibrations are being used to galvanize and express affective ties to community.

In this moment of the threat of COVID-19, the queerness of sound is being overwhelmingly utilized to solicit connection, bodily movement, and generative opportunities to work through the psychic sublimation of fear and uncertainty bred by the spread of the virus.

In the context of this project, I have suggested that the queerness of sound works as a register

138 with which to explain Filipinx diaspora as an ensemble of vibrations, affects and meanings that are sometimes in excess of semiotic frames. As Fred Moten suggests, “Words don’t go there. It is only music, only sound, that goes there” (Not In Between” 42). In his rigorous examination of the rupture between words and sound, specifically in the music of free jazz pioneer, Cecil Taylor,

Moten suggests that sound is “suspended brightness” that vibrates beyond familiar lexicons

(Break 45). In this dissertation, I have documented an archive of diasporic sonic expression that

“goes there” and, in the process, I suggest that such forms of sound-making produce a different mode with which to render Filipinx subjectivity. My staging of a discussion between sound studies, Filipinx Studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis hopes to provide method with which to suggest that such forms of sound-making are not only queer in form but are made queer by the juridical and symbolic forces of social norms and racialized stereotypes.

Sound, according to Moten, cannot be trusted at a measure of authenticity or historical record. As

I have argued in this dissertation, the oral/aural, metaphorical, and epistemological substances of sound create an opening to relationality that remakes our sense of self and of others, and of historical records. Moten suggests that sound in the form of music compels a “noncoercive rearrangement of desire” that moves us towards insight regardless of its intention or our submission (Black and Blur 273). This dissertation has argued that in this way, sound opens us up to non-normative modes of relating and belonging, and it thus possesses a queer valence.

Amidst the reorganizing of social life after executive orders to socially distance, there is a collective effort to stay connected, yet the virus’ threat to the health of the national body reveals the continued incommensurability of racialized and migrant identities that are mercilessly jettisoned and queered from its borders. Indeed, the number of Filipinx labourers, nurses, and caregivers that have contracted the virus because of a lack of protection is staggering.

139

This dissertation has suggested that sound holds the potential to defy hierarchies of race that deem Filipinx people as abject or queer to the demands of the nation-state. In this moment, nurses from the Philippines are being deployed to other countries such as Germany to care for the health and well-being of individuals and families other than their own. In Canada, a widely circulated news story told of Mary Ann De Ramos, a Filipinx caregiver for a Canadian family who holds a work visa, not citizenship. When the Canadian government informed its citizens that they should return from travel due to the virus, De Ramos and her employers made their way to the border after vacationing in Mexico. De Ramos was banned from re-entry and was stuck at the border, while her employers easily returned to the safety of home. Sites of state-instituted separation of Filipinx people are not new. As I have discussed, the post-colonial subject must grapple with the historical residues of abjecthood that codify acceptable sites of belonging and national participation. Abiding by an “imperial grammar” (Caronan 3) or demonstrating utility to the neoliberal family does not necessarily grant access to citizenship, nor does the guise of respectability politics affect the racialization of borders. Despite Mary Anne De Ramos’ declaration of paying Canadian taxes and contributing to “build the multicultural Canadian community we all are proud of” (Keung), her body becomes a site of contestation, where she is both called upon and excluded by the nation-state. The consequences of abjection are prevalent across multiple geographic locations.

In this conclusion, I centre the psycho-social and political labour of sound in this historical moment of social isolation for two main reasons: First, because, as my dissertation suggests, it presents a generative inquiry into how Filipinx communities have historically turned to sound, in particular to computers, phones, and music, to convey the sonics of longing, love and support across physical and psychic borders. Second, in thinking about how Filipinx subjectivity collides with expectations of the nation-state, this project has been concerned with sounds’ capacity to re-

140 signify the abject figure into possessing complex forms of agency. I have made use of queer and psychoanalytic theory to better grapple with how sound holds the potential to socially elaborate affective, libidinal and political conflicts attached to diasporic subjectivity.

My critique throughout this project has been concerned with how sound is used by Filipinx subjects living in the aftermath of colonial dispossession, violence, and genocide to manipulate and symbolize understandings of home, family history, and kinship. As both a multisensory phenomenon and metaphorical mode of expression, sound captures affective registers that reconceptualise its potential knowability. Thus, sound and queerness find kinship in ambiguity.

Where “queer” denotes a difficulty to pin down or that which challenges semantic containment, sound, too, is on the move because it can be conceived of as vibrations that are “unbounded”; their relations are defined by process, articulation, and change across material (Eidsheim 17).

Conceiving of sound as vibration recognizes it as an unfolding phenomenon that moves across bounded surfaces, temporal moments, codified identities, and kinship networks. As I have discussed, in physics, sound is a vibration that is processed into an acoustic wave that is then transmitted through and between different mediums. In this dissertation, I have dwelled on the queerness of sound to show how the sounds of diaspora, as they travel through and between material and affective registers, can be life-making. Such sounds potentially provide respite from grief, stir pleasure and joy, act as a conduit for creativity and intimacy, and traverse emotional and geographic borders. Queer sound, then, is an emotive, expressive and recuperative force that becomes a condition of possibility.

In addressing the overlap between queer subjectivity and sound studies, I have used the term queer sonic in an attempt to capture the unassimilable qualities of sound, so that we might broaden racialized imaginings of Filipinx subjectivity. A prevailing question of this project has

141 been: What does it mean to pay attention to sound in Filipinx culture that might otherwise be overlooked or rendered queer or unintelligible? Drawing on a rich history of theorizing in queer studies, my use of “queer” throughout this project has gestured to the ways in which the Filipinx body has historically been imagined as always already abject within imperial imaginaries.

Attending to “queer” as a racialized signifier, I deploy queerness as affect, as method, as subject formation, and as identification, in order to imagine how racialized and sexually marginalized subjects harness sound to challenge hegemonic expectations of whiteness, heteronormativity and citizenship. I am indebted to the important work done within Queer Filipino Diaspora studies to think about the performances of queer Filipinos across multiple geographic spaces, but these projects have focalized performance in embodied subjectivity. For example, Martin

Manalansan’s writing importantly maps genealogies of gay Filipinx vernacular; Bobby

Benedicto’s work on gay globalities examines queerness and desire across transnational spaces; and Robert Diaz’s (2016) research reimagines Filipinx nationalisms through vernacular forms of queer embodiment. My contribution to this field of study has sought to expand on notions of queerness to suggest that sound as a methodological framework can offer opportunities to understand how we might sense Filipinx and queer differently.

Contemporary studies of diaspora have worked to elucidate the shifting dynamics of migration, settler colonialism, globalization, and the gendered practices inherent in displacement and exile.

Rhacel Parreñas and Lok Siu have helped me to map out how ethnically defined diasporas, like the Filipinx diaspora, are spread across multiple countries and how, despite the unfolding complexities of these migrant formations, each carry the potential to reaffirm notions of monoculturalism. They use the plural term Asian Diasporas to “underscore the multiple and varied formations of Asian diasporas as well as the fragmentation of ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality, and class in and across diaspora” (7). In this dissertation, I have attempted to

142 emphasize the heterogeneity of Filipinx diasporas in Canada and beyond, in order to consider how sound might differently animate how Filipinx people have been “producing and reproducing themselves anew” within and across multiple geographic locations (“Cultural” Hall 402).

(Dis)Identification and Queer Futurity

Throughout this dissertation, I have engaged with the work of Rinaldo Walcott, Dina Georgis, and Robert Diaz in order to show how thinking diaspora queerly opens up analysis of the ways in which processes of identification are fraught for diasporic subjects who experience multiple forms of marginalization. José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification has thoroughly helped me to imagine how racialized and sexually marginalized subjects challenge hegemonic expectations of whiteness, heteronormativity and citizenship. Muñoz argues that disidentification is about the

“recycling and rethinking of encoded meaning” (Disidentifications 31). To disidentify is an act of political resistance against normative scripts that reveals how queer-racialized people have been “rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (31). Theories of disidentification appear in the work of others (Butler; Edelman; Meem at al.), but for Muñoz, disidentification specifically gives language to the ways in which queer-racialized artists animate and manipulate their hybrid subjectivities to confront the hegemony of whiteness. Muñoz argues that “disidentification [is] a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance” (25). Queer-racialized artists perform disidentifications as a method of contesting dominant ideologies, or what Muñoz calls

“repressive regimes of truth” (99). Integral to his argument is that for disidentification to occur, there must be a transformation that allows for new and more hopeful political formations.

For Muñoz, queerness is a relational force that steps outside of normative conceptions of time and place and is oriented towards hope for the future. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of

Queer Futurity, Muñoz argues that queer art captures this act of “stepping out” (185). Muñoz’s

143 work on queer temporality is a move beyond the politics of identity that reconceptualizes queerness as a potentiality, a horizon to reach for. Written at a time where debates about political utopianism were confronted by antirelational readings of queerness (Edelman and Bersani, most famously), Muñoz uses hope and utopia as a methodology. Edelman and Bersani had argued that queerness cuts through relations rather than building them, whereas Muñoz believes queerness to be a shared sense of difference that produces community. He argues that “queerness should and could be about desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough” (Muñoz, Cruising 96). Muñoz helps me to situate queer desire as a creative force that yields aesthetic responses. Queer aesthetic production forces a confrontation with our longings for justice and for expressions of desire that have not been welcomed by racism or homophobia.

My dissertation has also offered a space to work through difficult feelings concerning my own cultural production as a queer, Filipinx subject. I have turned to Muñoz to help theorize my own

(dis)identification in performance and my uses of sound as a queer diasporic response to homophobia and racism. His work has helped to deepen my discussion of the role of sound in articulations of selfhood and as a method of social inquiry. Before beginning this dissertation, I was a member of Ohbijou, an orchestral pop band, and in 2017, I released a solo album titled

Psychic Materials. In my time in the band, my Filipinx body was often described by the media and music critics as producing “multicultural” sound. Conflations of my brownness as a discernable sonic signifier made me grow tired of the ways in which our orchestral pop sound and my Filipinx presence were rendered by audience members and Canadian media as disjunctive from industry logics and as exceptional within a white supremacist and patriarchal imaginary.

144

This dissertation has argued that the queerness of sound elaborates meanings in excess of hierarchal structure, but in this mode of disidentification is a painful reflection of the histories and political devices that attempt to contain that which is queer to social norms. My dissatisfaction with the public performance of music does not mean I lost faith in the social or affective power of music; in fact, I often wish to be transported back to moments on stage where

I was consumed by affect and lost sense of time and embodiment. The conceptual rubric of the queerness of sound offered in this dissertation has provided me with psychic relief and understanding; in the changing intensities of my voice and the unexpected vibrations produced by my body, through sound, I now understand that I was using music as a mode of working through shame, repression, and the affective impact of racialization and homophobia. However, the queerness of sound is precisely also the reason that made me stop playing music in that musical formation. In seeking enmeshment between the many workings of the queerness of sound, I have been able to hold space for both optimism and despair. This is a project about collective hope and hardship, but I’ve also offered thinking about sound in terms of the psychic space of aurality and the affective registers of sound itself.

In his introduction to Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries, Robert

Diaz (2018) describes the need for historical archives of queer, Filipinx life:

Queer horizons are often contained within incongruent archives, terms or constructs that

resist collection and academic compartmentalization. Queer archives need not rely on

educational institutions or museums to exist or to have political use. Rather, these

archives are found in many flashpoints, stories, acts, and emotions that constitute

quotidian counter-publics and that confound, even as they expand, processes that have

attempted to organize their meanings. (xx)

145

This dissertation has sought to archive and theorize a collection of impressions made by the experience of listening to Filipinx desire. Drawing on Diaz, I have attempted to organize the meanings of queer sounds so that their affective, psychic, social, and political importance is amplified. A theory of sound by way of queer theory has helped me to clarify the necessity of listening to Filipinx history for its immense contributions to contemporary cultural production.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, and Richard Leppert. Essays on Music. University of California Press, 2002.

Aguilar, Carlos. “Wordless Love Verses: Hong Khaou on the Heartbreaking Language of

‘Lilting’,” IndieWire. 1 Oct. 2014, www.indiewire.com/2014/10/wordless-love-verses-

hong-khaou-on-the-heartbreaking-language-of-lilting-171901/. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.

---. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.

Alampay, Erwin, et al. “The Impact of Cybercafés on the Connectedness of Children Left

Behind by Overseas Filipino Workers.” Global Impact Study Research Report Series.

National College of Public Administration and Governance, 2013.

Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics,

Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press, 2006.

Allen, Jafari S. “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian

and Gay Studies, vol. 18, no. 2-3, 2012, pp. 211-48.

Ang, Alvin P. “Workers’ Remittances and Its Impact on Rural Development in the Philippines.”

Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 63-77.

Angermann, Asaf. “The Ghosts of Normativity: Temporality and Recurrence in Adorno’s Ethics

of Dissonance.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, vol. 90, no. 4, 2015,

pp. 260-272.

Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-Davis. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour

and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. Routledge, 1992.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands-La frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego. Yale University Press, 1989.

146 147

Anzieu, Didier, and Naomi Segal. The Skin-Ego. Karnac, 2016.

Arondekar, Anjali. “Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters Outside the

U.S.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall and Annamarie

Jagose, Routledge, 2012, pp. 547-557.

Atienza, Glecy. Mukhung Maarte. UST Publishing Press, 2003.

Bahng, Aimee. Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Duke University

Press, 2018.

Balance, Christine Bacareza. “How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian

American YouTube Performance.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1-2,

2012, pp. 138-52.

---. Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America. Duke University Press,

2016.

“Balang’s US Debut.” YouTube, uploaded by TheEllenShow, 16 May 2015.

youtu.be/m0taQOtvxfU

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. Blackwell, 1986.

Beauchamp, Airek. “Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling Body.”

Sounding Out!,https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/09/14/sonic-tremblings-sound-affect-

queer-body. Accessed 6 July 2019.

Benedicto, Bobby. “‘The Haunting of Gay Manila’: Global Space-Time and the Specter of

Kabaklaan.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, no. 2-3, 2008, pp.

317-38.

Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA,

vol. 110, no. 3, pp. 343-49.

Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave?: And Other Essays. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

148

Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October, vol.

28, Spring 1984, 125-33.

Bharucha, Jamshed J. “Anchoring Effects in Music: The Resolution of Dissonance.” Cognitive

Psychology, vol. 16, no. 4, 1984, pp. 485-518.

---. “Event Hierarchies, Tonal Hierarchies, and Assimilation: A Reply to Deautsch and

Dowling.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 113, no. 3, pp. 421-25.

Bidelman, Gavin M. and Jeremy Grall. “Functional Organization for Musical Consonance and

Tonal Pitch Hierarchy in Human Auditory Cortex.” NeuroImage, vol. 101, 2014, pp. 204-

214.

Black, Stuart. “Interview: Hong Khaou on New Film Lilting.” Londonist. 1 Aug. 2014,

londonist.com/2014/08/interview-hong-khaou-on-new-film-lilting. Accessed 17 May

2020.

Blackman, Lisa. Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. SAGE, 2012.

Bolaki, Stella. “‘New Living the Old In a New Way’: Home and Queer Migrations in Audre

Lorde’s Zami.” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 4, 2011, pp. 779-98.

Bonenfant, Yvon. “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres.” Performance Research, vol. 15,

no. 3, Sept. 2010, pp. 74-80.

Bora, Renu. “Outing Texture.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 94-127.

Bouchard, Greg. “4 Show-Stopping Performances from X Avant X.” A.Side. 20 Oct. 2015,

ontheaside.com/uncategorized/4-show-stopping-performances-from-x-avant-x/. Accessed

17 May 2020.

149

Bowling, Daniel L., and Dale Purves. “A Biological Rationale for Musical Consonance.”

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2015,

edited by Jonathan H. Snyder, PNAS, 24 July 2015.

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Canada, 2001.

Britzman, Deborah P. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of

Learning. State University of New York Press, 1998.

Britzman, Deborah. Novel Education. Peter Lang, 2006.

Brown, Gavin, and Kath Browne. The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex

and Sexualities. Routledge, 2016.

Bryant, Jason. “The Meaning of Queer Home.” The Journal of Architecture, Design and

Domestic Space, vol. 12, no. 3, 2015, pp. 261-89.

Burns, Lucy San Pablo. Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of Empire. New York University

Press, 2013.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Branigan, Edward. “Soundtrack in Mind.” Projections, vol. 4, no. 1, New York, 2010, pp. 41-67

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.

Canadian Art. “Guelph Artist Wins 25K RBC Canadian Painting Competition.” 18 Nov. 2015,

canadianart.ca/news/guelph-artist-wins-25k-rbc-canadian-painting-competition/.

Accessed 1 Feb. 2017.

Caronan, Faye. Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural

Critique. University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Carson, Anne. Men In the Off Hours: Essays and Poetry. Vintage Canada, 2001.

Cazden, Norman. “The Systemic Reference of Musical Consonance Response.” International

Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 3, no. 2, 1972, pp. 217-45.

150

Ceraso, Steph. “(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the

Composition of Sonic Experiences.” College English, vol. 77, no. 2, 2014, pp. 102-23.

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University,

2012.

Cheng, Anne Anlin, and Josephine Baker. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern

Surface. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamomoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy

Kogawa. Cornell University Press, 1993.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press, 1994.

---. The Voice In the Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1999.

Chion, Michel, and James A. Steintrager. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Duke University

Press, 2016.

Coloma, Roland Sintos, editor. Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility. University of

Toronto Press, 2012.

Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Fordham University

Press, 2016.

---. “That There Might Be Queer Sound.” Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. 29 Oct. 2014,

www.pewcenterarts.org/post/there-might-be-queer-sound-ashon-crawley. Accessed 17

May 2020.

Cruz, Patrick. Artist Talk, 1 Feb. 2017, OCAD University, Toronto, ON.

Dahlhaus, Carl. Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays. Cambridge University Press, 1987. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, University of

California Press, 1984.

151 de la Cruz, Enrique, et al. The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political

Cartoons. Eastwind Books, 2014.

Diaz, Robert. “The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings ofMy Husband’s Lover,

Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and

Society, vol. 40, no. 3, 2015, pp. 721–745.

---. “Queer Unsettlements: Diasporic Filipinos in Canada’s World Pride.”

Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2016, pp. 327–350. ---. “The Ruse of Respectability: Familial Attachments and Queer Filipino Canadian

Critique.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, vol. 4, no. 1–2, Mar. 2018,

pp. 114–36.

Dinshaw, C., et al. “THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES: A Roundtable Discussion.”

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 13, no. 2–3, Jan. 2007, pp. 177–95.

Donnarumma, Marco. Configuring Corporeality: Performing Bodies, Vibrations and New

Musical Instruments. 2016. Goldsmiths University of London, PhD dissertation.

Dyer, Hannah. “Reparation for a Violent Boyhood: Pedagogies of Mourning in Shane Meadow’s

This Is England.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 3, 2017, pp. 315–25.

Scholars Portal Journals.

---. The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of

Child Development. Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Edelman, Lee. No future queer theory and the death drive. Durham, Duke University

Press, 2004. Print.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke

University Press, 2015.

152

Emily & Natalie. “INTERVIEW: Patrick Cruz.” The Gathered Gallery. 25 May 2016,

www.thegatheredgallery.com/post/2016/05/25/interview-patrick-cruz-1. Accessed 1 Feb.

2017.

Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.

Duke University Press, 2010.

Esguerra, Arnulfo. “From Lanao to California: The Evolution of the Kulintang.” The University

of the Philippines Manila Journal, Special Issue 2009, pp. 49-59.

Fajardo, Kale Bantigue. Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities,

and Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

---. “Queering and Transing the Great Lakes: Filipino/a Tomboy Masculinities and Manhoods

across Waters.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 20, no. 1-2, Jan. 2014,

pp. 115-140.

---. “Transportation: Translating Filipino and Filipino American Tomboy Masculinities through

Global Migration and Seafaring.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14,

no. 2-3, 2008, pp. 403-24.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967.

Farrales, May. “Delayed, Deferred and Dropped out: Geographies of Filipino-Canadian High

School Students.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017, pp. 207-23.

Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of

Minnesota Press, 2004.

Fongang, Delphine. “Cosmopolitan Dilemma: Diasporic Subjectivity and Postcolonial

Liminality in Teju Cole’s Open City.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 4,

Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 138–54.

153

Forrest, Thomas. A Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas: 1774-1776. Oxford University

Press, 1969.

Fortier, Anne-Marie. “‘Coming Home’: Queer Migrations and Multiple Evocations of Home.”

European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 4, 2001, pp. 405-24.

---. Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Berg, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon, 1977.

---. “Scientia Sexualis.” History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Vintage Books, 1978,

pp. 53-73.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press,

2010.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Stratchey, vol. 14, Hogarth

Press, 1953.

Gallagher, Michael. “Sound as Affect: Difference, Power and Spatiality.” Emotion, Space and

Society, vol. 20, Aug. 2016, pp. 42-48.

Gallope, Michael. “Is Improvisation Present?” The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation

Studies, Volume 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 2015, pp. 143-59.

Garrido, Maco. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. University of

Chicago Press, 2019.

Garvey, Johanna X. K. “Spaces of Violence, Desire, and Queer (Un)Belonging: Dionne Brand’s

Urban Diasporas.” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 4, 2011, pp. 757-777.

Georgis, Dina. “The Aesthetic Archive and Lamia Joreige’s Objects of War.” CNPC 1: The

Freudian Legacy Today, 2015, pp. 46-61.

---. The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East. SUNY, 2013.

154

---. “Cultures of Expulsion: Memory, Longing and the Queer Space of Diaspora.” New Dawn:

Journal of Black Canadian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 4-27.

---. “Discarded Histories and Queer Affects in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.” Studies in

Gender and Sexuality, vol. 15, no. 2, Mar. 2014, pp. 154-66.

---. “What Does the Tree Remember? The Politics of Telling Stories”. TOPIA, vol. 25, Winter

2011, pp. 222-29.

Georgis, Dina, and R. M. Kennedy. “Touched by Injury: Toward an Educational Theory of Anti-

Racist Humanism.” Ethics and Education, vol. 4, no. 1, 2009, pp. 19-30.

Gerloff, Felix, and Sebastian Schwesinger. “Sonic Thinking: Epistemological Modellings of the

Sonic in Audio Papers and Beyond.” Interference Journal, vol. 5, 2016, pp. 89-102.

Gilbert, Jen. “Risking a Relation: Sex Education and Adolescent Development.” Sex Education,

vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 47-61.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993.

Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. MIT Press, 2009.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke

University Press, 2005.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke University

Press, 2018.

Grande, A., J. Jessie, Minaj. N. “Bang, Bang.” Sweet Talker and My Everything, Lava, Republic,

2014.

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press,

2009.

Grewal, Inderpal, and Kaplan Caran. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of

Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2001, pp. 663-79.

155

Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahata. Dogeaters. Penguin Books, 1991.

---. Dream Jungle. Penguin Books, 2003.

Hagman, George. Aesthetic Experience: Beauty, Creativity, and the Search for the Ideal. Rodopi,

2005.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

---. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University

Press, 2005.

Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. SAGE,

1997.

Harris, Anna. “Listening-Touch, Affect and the Crafting of Medical Bodies through Percussion.”

Body & Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 2016, pp. 31-61.

Hartmann, William M. Signals, Sound, and Sensation. American Institute of Physics, 1997.

Heble, Ajay. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice. Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group, 2000.

Henriques, Julian. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of

Knowing. Bloomsbury, 2011.

Higgins, Shawn M. “Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-Hop Nation by

Antonio T. Tiongson Jr (Review).” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 18, no. 2,

June 2015, pp. 224-26.

Hilmes, Michele. “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?”

American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2005, pp. 249-59. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Turnaround, 1991.

156

Hsu, Hsuan L. “Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao.” MFS

Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, 2006, pp. 675-704.

“Interview with José Muñoz (2002).” What Is Performance Studies?, edited by Diana Taylor and

Marcos Steuernagel. 2002, feng scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/wips/jose-muoz-english.

Accessed 17 May 2020.

Isaac, Allan Punzalan. American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America. University of

Minnesota Press, 2006.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 1996.

James, Rachel. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Duke

University Press, 2019.

Jennex, Craig. “Resoundingly Queer: Cover Song as Collective Return.” TOPIA, vol. 35, Spring

2016, pp. 87-106.

Jiminez, Isaac Donoso. “Historiography of the Moro Kulintang.” Revista Transcultural de

Musica/Transcultural Music Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008. Accessed 10 November 2019.

Kalanduyan, Danongan. “Magindanaon Kulintang Music: Instruments, Repertoire, Performance

Contexts, Social Functions.” Asian Music, vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 3-18.

“Kanta ng isang Anak para sa kanyang inang OFW ‘Blank Space’” YouTube, uploaded by

Matteo Menesis, 29 June 2015. https://youtu.be/SltmaTnof-Q

Kapchan. Deborah. “Body.” Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak, M. Sakakeeny, Durham:

Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 33 - 44.

Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2019.

Keeling, Kara, and Josh Kun. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2012.

157

Kennedy, Michael, and Joyce Bourne. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford

University Press, USA, 2004.

Keung, Nicholas. “She Went with Her Employer to Mexico. Now This Filipina Nanny Can’t Get

Back into Canada because of the Pandemic.” The Star, 19 March 2020,

www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/03/19/she-went-with-her-employer-to-mexico-now-

this-filipina-nanny-cant-get-back-into-canada-because-of-the-pandemic.html. Accessed

17 May 2020.

Kheshti, Roshanak. “Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture

Industry.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011,

pp. 711–31.

Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works

1921-1945. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975.

---. “The Psychoanalytic Play Technique.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 25, no. 2,

1955, pp. 223-37.

---. Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works, 1946-1963. New York: Free Press, 1984.

---. The Selected Melanie Klein, edited by Juliet Mitchell. Free Press, 1987.

Kosnik, Abigail De. “Perfect Covers: Filipino Musical Mimicry and Transmedia Performance.”

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 3, no. 1, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp.

137–61.

Kostelanetz, Richard et al., editors. Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing

Symposium. Schirmer Books, 1996.

Kouri-Towe, Natalie. “Trending Homonationalism.” No More Potlucks, vol. 19, Jan./Feb. 2012,

nomorepotlucks.org/site/trending-homonationalism/. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. University of California Press, 2005.

158

Lafrance, Mark. “From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An Introduction to the Work of

Didier Anzieu.” Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis, edited by S. Cavanagh, A. Failler, R.

Hurst, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 16-44.

Lasco, Gideon. “‘Little Brown Brothers’: Height and the Philippine–American Colonial

Encounter (1898–1946).” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints,

vol. 66, no. 3, 2018, pp. 375-406.

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press, 1982.

---. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1984. Crossing Press, 2007.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University

Press, 2009.

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.

Luibhéid, Eithne, and Lionel Cantú. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border

Crossings. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Mahboob, Tahiat. “Pantayo: 7 Things to Know about the ‘Super Girl Gong Group’.” CBC Music.

8 March 2017, www.cbcmusic.ca/posts/18182/pantayo-7-things-all-women-filipina-

gong-ensemble. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Duke University Press,

2003.

---. “Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City.” The Smell Culture

Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, Bloomsbury Academic, 2006, pp. 41-52.

---. “Migrancy, Modernity, Mobility Quotidian Struggles and Queer Diasporic Intimacy.” Queer

Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, edited by Eithne Luibhéid

and Lionel Cantú, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 146-60.

159

---. “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life.” In Political Emotions,

edited by J. Staiger, A. Cvetkovich, A. Reynolds, New York, London: Routledge, 2010,

pp. 215-226.

---. “Queer Worldings: The Messy Art of Being Global in Manila and New York.” Antipode, vol.

47, no. 3, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12061. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Manalansan, Martin F., and Augusto Fauni Espiritu, editors. Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of

Nation and Diaspora. New York University Press, 2016.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Meem, Deborah T. et al. Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies. SAGE, 2010.

Mendoza, Victor Román. Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and

the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913. Duke University Press, 2015.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Donald A. Landes. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge,

2014.

Migone, Christof. Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body. Errant Bodies, 2012.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event.

Routledge, 2011.

Mohan, Rajeswari, and Ronald Strickland. “Multiculturalism in the Nineties: Pitfalls and

Possibilities.” After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s,

edited by Christopher Newfield, Westview Press, 1995, pp. 372-88.

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of

Minnesota Press, 2003.

---. “Not in Between Lyric Painting, Visual History, and the Postcolonial Future.” TDR/The

Drama Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2003, pp. 127-48.

---. Black and Blur. Duke University Press, 2017.

160

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York

University Press, 2009.

---. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota

Press, 1999.

Murray, Albert. “Improvisation and the Creative Process.” The Jazz Cadence of American

Culture, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, 1998, Columbia University Press, pp. 112-113.

Musser, Amber Jamilla. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. New York

University Press, 2018.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and Janet Hoskins, editors. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging

Field. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014.

Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015.

Nyong’o, Tavia. Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York University Press,

2018.

Parreñas, Rhacel. “Long Distance Intimacy: Class, Gender and Intergenerational Relations

between Mothers and Children in Filipino Transnational Families.” Global Networks, vol.

5, no. 4, 2005, pp. 317-36.

---. “‘White Trash’ Meets the ‘Little Brown Monkeys’: The Taxi Dance Hall as a Site of

Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working Class Women and Filipino

Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 115-

34.

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, and Lok C. D. Siu, editors. Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New

Conceptions. Stanford University Press, 2007.

Patton, Cindy, and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler. Queer Diasporas. Duke University Press, 2000.

161

Perillo, J. Lorenzo. “‘If I Was Not in Prison, I Would Not Be Famous’: Discipline,

Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines.” Theatre Journal, vol. 63, no. 4, 2011,

pp. 607-21.

Philippine Statistics Authority. “2017 Survey on Overseas Filipinos (Results from the 2017

Survey on Overseas Filipinos).” Published 18 May 2018. psa.gov.ph/content/2017-

survey-overseas-filipinos-results-2017-survey-overseas-filipinos. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Pido, Eric J. Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity. Duke

University Press, 2017.

Pino, Fritz, et al., editors. Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries.

Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Ponce, Martin Joseph. Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading.

New York University Press, 2012.

---. “Pinoy Posteriority.” Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, edited by Martin

Fauni Manalansan and Augusto Fauni Espiritu, New York University Press, 2016, pp.

251-273.

Porcello, Thomas, and David Samuels. “Language,” Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak, M.

Sakakeeny, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 87 - 98.

Porter, Dennis. “Psychoanalysis and the Task of the Translator.” Comparative Literature, vol.

104, no. 5, 1989, pp. 1066-84.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. Duke University Press,

2007.

---. “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas,” Q & A:

Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, Temple University

Press, 1998, pp. 405-422.

162

Rice, Tom. Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience. Sean

Kingston Publishing, 2013.

---. “Listening.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke

University Press, 2015, n.p.

Royster, Francesca T. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-

Soul Era. University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Rutherford, Jonathan, editor. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Lawrence & Wishart,

1990.

Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia University

Press, 2017.

Ryan, Robert. “‘The Year that Punk Broke’: Notes on the Legacy of Dissonance.” Post45. 15

June 2015, post45.org/2015/06/the-year-that-punk-broke-notes-on-the-legacy-of-

dissonance/. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.

---. Out of Place: A Memoir. 1st Vintage Bks. ed, Vintage Books, 2000.

Saussure, Ferdinand de, and Tullio De Mauro. Cours de linguistique générale. Payot, 1972.

Sarmiento, Thomas X. “The Empire Sings Back: Glee’s Queer Materialization of Filipina/o

America.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp.

211-34.

Schwarz, David. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Duke University Press,

1997. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.

Duke University Press, 2003.

163

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Updated with a New Preface. University

of California Press, 2008.

See, Sarita Echavez. The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance. Univerrsity

of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American

West. University of California Press, 2011.

Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

---. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Duke University Press, 2010.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

Indiana University Press, 2005.

Simpson, Paul. “Sonic Affects and the Production of Space: ‘Music by Handle’ and the Politics

of Street Music in Victorian London.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017, pp. 89-

109.

Smith, Sarah Stefana. “Surface Play: Rewriting Black Interiorities through Camouflage and

Abstraction in Mickalene Thomas’ Oeuvre.” Women and Performance: A Journal of

Feminist Theory, vol. 28, no. 1, 2018, pp. 46-64.

Snorton, C. Riley. Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. University

of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Sign and Trace.” An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard

University Press, 2012, pp. 484-507.

Stein, Arlene, and Ken Plummer. “‘I Can’t Even Think Straight’: ‘Queer’ Theory and the

Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology.” Sociological Theory, vol. 12, no. 2, 1994, pp.

178-87.

Steintrager, James A., and Rey Chow, editors. Sound Objects. Duke University Press, 2019.

164

Stephens, Michelle Ann. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer. Duke

University Press, 2014.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University

Press, 2003.

---, editor. The Sound Studies Reader. Routledge, 2012.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke

University Press, 2009.

Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New

York University Press, 2016.

Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “The Noise of SB1070: Or, Do I Sound Illegal to You?”

SoundingOut! 19 August 2020, soundstudiesblog.com/2010/08/19/the-noise-of-sb-1070.

Accessed 17 May 2020.

Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Harvard University Press, 1970.

Sugg, Katherine. Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2008.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine

Consequences for the New World Order. Hong Kong University Press, 2004.

---. “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism.” Social Text, vol. 31.2, no. 115,

2013, pp. 19-48.

Teague, Jessica E. “The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.’”

American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, pp. 555-71.

Tenney, James. A History of Consonance and Dissonance. Excelsior, 1988.

Tongson, Karen. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York University Press, 2011.

Trimillos, Ricardo D. “Music and Ethnic Identity: Strategies among Overseas Filipino Youth.”

165

Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol. 18, 1986, p. 9.

Tungohan, Ethel. “Reconceptualizing Motherhood, Reconceptualizing Resistance: Migrant

Domestic Workers, Transnational Hyper-Maternalism and Activism.” International

Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 15, no. 1, 2013, pp. 39-57.

Tyler, Katharine. “Suburban Ethnicities: Home as the Site of Interethnic Conviviality and

Racism.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 71, no. 2, 2020, pp. 221–35.

Varty, Alexander. “Pantayo’s Filipino Gongs Meet EDM Rhythms.” The Georgia Straight. 24

April 2019, www.straight.com/arts/1232361/pantayos-gongs-meet-edm-rhythms.

Accessed 17 May 2020.

Vogel, Shane. “Touching Ecstasy: Muñozian Theory and the Extension of the Soul.” Social Text,

vol. 32.4, no. 121, 2014, pp. 47-57. von Helmholtz, Hermann, et al. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the

Theory of Music. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875.

Walcott, Rinaldo. “Pedagogy and Trauma: The Middle Passage, Slavery and the Problem of

Creolization.” Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical

Trauma, edited by Sharon Rosenberg, Claudia Eppert, and Roger I. Simon, Rowman and

Littlefield, 2000, pp. 135-51.

---. Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies. Insomniac Press,

2016.

---. “Reconstructing Manhood; or, The Drag of Black Masculinity.” Small Axe: A Caribbean

Journal of Criticism, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 75-89.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard

University Press, 2000.

166

Wesling, Meg. “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 2008, pp. 30-47.

Whittick, Olivia. “A Week of Canadian Painting: Patrick Cruz.” The Editorial Magazine. 10

Dec. 2015, the-editorialmagazine.com/?p=8605. Accessed 1 Feb. 2017.

Williams, Matt. “Stoicism and Slow Burns on Final Night of Wavelength Music Festival.” NOW

Toronto. 15 Feb. 2016, nowtoronto.com/music/concert-reviews/stoicism-and-slow-burns-

on-final-night-of-wavelength-music-f/. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. Basic Books, 1971.

Woloshyn, Alexa. “Electraoacoustic Voices: Sounds Queer, and Why it Matters.” Tempo, vol.

71, no. 280, 2017, pp. 68-79.

Zamora, Linmark R. Rolling the R’s. Anniversary edition, Kaya Press, 2016.

Zarum, Lara. “RBC Canadian Painting Competition Winner Patrick Cruz on Immigration,

Filipino Culture, and Chaos.” CBC Arts. 23 Nov. 2015, www.cbc.ca/beta/arts/rbc-

canadian-painting-competition-winner-patrick-cruz-on-immigration-filipino-culture-and-

chaos-1.3331125. Accessed 1 Feb. 2017.