UC San Diego

Queer Intimacies analyzes how Filipino/x American and Indigenous writers and cultural producers of the Philippines (re)imagine intimate relationships. Filipino/x Americans turn to and imagine Indigeneity as locked in their past to challenge the legacy of U.S. cultural imperialism and to decolonize their and our minds. By doing so, they instead perpetuate a Philippine nationalism that nationalizes Indigenous Peoples as Filipino instead of seeing how Indigenous Peoples have resisted and continue to resist Spanish, U.S., and Japanese colonialisms. Indigenous Peoples also resist nationalization to protect their cultural traditions and land while Filipinos see Indigenous Peoples not as real people but instead as precolonial knowledge. By queering intimacy which I define as a desire to be close to and to become another subject, I question Filipino/xs desire to be close to Indigenous Peoples by looking at literary representations and interactions between the two as characters. Each chapter exposes a tendency by canonical Filipino/x American writers, a Philippine director, and a self-identified Igorot Indigenous American from the Philippines to use novels, a film, and a historical novel to reimagine Filipino/xs as Indigenous descendants and vice versa. I argue that the writers and cultural producers use canonical fiction novels, historical fiction, and movies to create worlds where Filipino/x people instead of imagining themselves as Indigenous, can imagine better solidarities and relationships that challenge U.S. settler colonialism and Philippine Nation-State oppressions. By reading these texts through three types of queer intimacies: (de)colonial, monstrous, and timescape, I push for the ways in which literature can, instead of promoting the idea that Filipino/xs are Indigenous and vice versa, (re)imagine life-worlds where Filipino/xs and Indigenous Peoples can band together in solidarity against U.S. settler colonialism and Philippine Nation-State oppressions. By rethinking and queering these intimacies and the above texts in the greater Queer (LGBTQIA+) Filipino/x diaspora, I show how the desire for closeness, as intimacy, between these subjects can also be ripe with misunderstandings and failures but also open opportunities for life-worlds that make better sense to them and us.