Dana Collins

“We're There and Queer”: Homonormative Mobility and Lived Experience among Gay Expatriates in Manila

This article offers an analysis of lived experiences of transnational mobility for gay-identified expatriates who reside in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing from in-depth interviewing and discourse analysis of eight cases, the author argues that homonormative mobility organizes gay mens travel, even as gay expatriates work to reimagine themselves through their travel and face destabilizing experiences in transnational spaces. The author offers a theorization of homonormative mobility to explain discourses of normative gender, race-nation, and desire in gay travel. Specifically, she argues that expatriates describe their mobility as (1) an escape from the heteronormative controls they face at home, (2) masculine access to freeing places in “foreign” playgrounds, (3) an act of homo-orientalist desire of Filipino men and spaces, (4) a desirable experience that builds their own self-confidence, and (5) troubling for their self-perceptions.

Identity, Mobility, and Urban Place-Making Exploring Gay Life in Manila

This article offers a nuanced analysis of identity reconstitution in transnational gay relations. Drawing from critical ethnography, the author focuses on Filipino gay-identified hosts, who remain invisible in global analyses of sexuality and tourism, as they create a gay space in Malate, an ex-sex and current tourist district in the city of Manila. Challenging the perception that gay identity is Western made, the author focuses on how gay host identity is constituted through hosts’travel/mobility and in relation to urban place. She discusses place-making as a strategy that allows gay hosts to see their identities transformed in Malate despite their social exclusion in the process of urban gentrification.

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights: AN INTRODUCTION

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminists are at a critical juncture to re-envision and re-engage in a politics of human rights that underscores the creative displays of grassroots resistance by women globally and affirms transnational feminist solidarity. In highlighting feminisms and human rights that are antiracist and social justice oriented, this issue highlights new research that reveals the transformative potential of a feminist human rights praxis that embraces collective justice. In this introduction, we discuss dominant critiques of human rights frameworks and explore critical human rights activism ‘from below’ in order to establish the context for this special issue on new directions in feminism and human rights.

Gay hospitality as desiring labor: Contextualizing transnational sexual labor

This critical ethnographic research explores gay hospitality as a ‘testimony of desire’ by working-class and ‘gay’-identified Filipino sexual laborers who ‘work’ as companions for foreign tourists in a gentrifying tourism district, Malate, the Philippines. I analyze gay hospitality as informal sexual labor by applying the concept of identity work, which involves hosts’ construction and maintenance of their ‘gay’ identity and connection to urban place. I argue that their testimonies of desire are subaltern development discourses, which speak to significant lived experiences of work and place and, which offer alternative configurations of identity, relationships, and economic exchange.

Racism and feminism: An analysis of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings

Abstract In this article we look at the consequences of feminisms being viewed as racially, geographically and historically specific. We suggest that as feminist ideas become publicly well known and popularised, they are forged through a notion of ‘woman’ as a singular, and non‐racialised category, which can be seen by looking at, for example, discussions of sexual harassment in the public domain. The discussion we analyse is from the transcripts of the Opening Remarks of the October 1991 US Senate Haerings, in which allegations of sexual harassment were put forward by Anita Hill, a black woman Professor of Law, against Clarence Thomas, a black man who was nominated as a Justice for the Supreme Court in the United States. We refine our concept of ‘discursive configurations’ for understanding the shifting meanings of sexual harassment, and outline some implications for developing racially conscious popular feminisms.