UC Riverside

“Knowing, Feeling: Toward a Queer Filipinx Poetics” is an exploration of contemporary queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming (QTGNC) Filipinx visual, digital, and print poetry. While the term “Filipinx'' was coined in the mid-2010s to be inclusive of QTGNC people in Filipina/o subjecthood, this dissertation argues that the term can function as a method, a shifting composition of difference where new understandings of gender and sexuality emerge. Contemporary poets Mark Aguhar, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Melinda M. Babaran, Karen Villa, and Aimee Suzara illustrate how “Filipinx” can be executed as a set of aesthetics, a mode of analysis, and an act of resistance. As a result of these multiple exercises, this dissertation argues that a Filipinx poetics is a hybrid method, where a poem’s formal elements do not only reflect the social conditions of Filipinx people, but also articulate queer futurisms that enable us to know and feel that another world is possible. Chapter One examines the repertoire of transfeminine multidisciplinary artist, Mark Aguhar, whose work critiques heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and ableism, demonstrating how these systems work together to produce aberrant queer of color bodies. Chapter Two compares Kay Ulanday Barrett’s and Melinda M. Babaran’s poetics, exploring the commensurabilities between tomboy masculinities and disability justice. Chapter Three analyzes a visual poem from filmmaker Karen Villa’s 2016 documentary, Visibilizing Queer Pinays [Filipinas] in Southern California. Villa’s “documentary-poem” highlights how queer death is symptomatic of U.S. empire and how haunting is manifested through poetic afterlife. Chapter Four close-reads Aimee Suzara’s poetry collection, Souvenir. Suzara uses Saidiya Hartman’s technique of “foraging and disfiguring” to “forage” and “disfigure” found language and images from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, demonstrating how the American museum and anthropology are undergirded by knowledge accumulation. The dissertation concludes with a lyric essay, a hybrid piece that connects disability, intergenerational trauma, and U.S. empire.

Ultimately, Knowing, Feeling investigates what queerness can do—what it agitates, what it animates—rather than who or what it may represent. It is this textual operative—how language can move, compel, touch, and provoke transformation within us—that informs a queer Filipinx poetics.