Martin Manalansan's interesting ethnography of gay Filipino immigrants to New York City—only the second booklength gay Asian "community study"— endeavors to show the complexities of globalization and hybridization in everyday life. Manalansan celebrates the agency of Filipino-Americans as they play with traditions of effeminacy (bakla') from "home" and mostly avoid emulating urban American gay masculinity (which for Manalansan is singular and white). He includes vignettes of bicultural apartments, daily routines, beauty pageants, folk Catholic rituals, AIDS-prevention presentations and extensive quotations in Tag[alog-Eng]lish.

Manalansan emphasizes the continued salience for many of his fellow emigrants from the Philippines, of their families of birth and of folk Catholicism; as well as documenting the maintenance of language and indigenous understandings of "drama" and "beauty" as organizing self-conceptions. He or they downplay "coming out" and political organizing, although some revel in the freedom of being far from parents and free to experiment with roles that would be negatively sanctioned "at home," to live with a male lover (the jowas mostly being white), and to make going to the gym a substitute for going to church. Many, especially the illegal immigrants, reported downward mobility in status. The reasons for migration (as adults in almost all instances) are not examined, leaving readers uncertain whether a substantial segment regretted (beyond standard-issue nostalgia for particular foods, rites, etc.) leaving the Philippines. (As is common in research on immigrants, those who moved back again are not reckoned with.)

Manalansan has very little to say about sexual behavior, focusing mostly on gender "transgression" in performing bakla' effeminacy in a new land with sexual partners unaware of the expectations of the bakla' role in the Philippines. Like other GAPI (gay Asian/Pacific Islander) intellectuals, Manalansan decries the stereotyping (by whites) of GAPI males as unmasculine. Yet, except for what seems to be a token body-builder, Manalansan's sample is males who refer to themselves as bakla', so that his book reinforces the image of effeminate Filipinos (as does the book's cover photo). Surely, the diaspora of Filipino gay men includes many endeavoring to "perform" versions of masculinity, eschewing "drag," and not identifying as bakla'.

Also surely, the American part of the Filipino diaspora includes the children and grandchildren of immigrants as well as new immigrants. Eighty-six percent of those Manalansan formally interviewed were immigrants. He makes no systematic contrast of immigrants and US-born although other studies have found not only differences but conflict between foreign-born and native-born API. In quotation and observation, the immigrants occupy even more than ninety-five percent of the textual space.

Manalansan recurrently mentions the problems (especially of employment) of illegal immigrants, but does not attempt systematically to compare differences between legal and illegal immigrants in deculturation/acculturation, sexual identity, gender identity or anything else, or even to speculate about such differences, or about how experiences of other diasporic sites with longer-standing and more concentrated populations of Filipino descent differ from those spread across metropolitan New York with whom Manalansan associated. Differences in the men's family's social status back in the Philippines are also left unanalyzed, though sometimes mentioned by immigrants who supposedly relegate it to the background in "identity articulation," but express frustration that some desirable white America men are attracted to Filipinos who are darker skinned than the upper-class Filipinos who dote on their light-skinned Spanish ancestry. (Denigrations of darker skin, and especially of black men, pop up in interviewee quotations without Filipino racism being addressed, let alone theorized. Immigrant Filipinos are agents in eagerly producing racist stereotypes, though this is a kind of "agency" Manalansan slides over, while recurrently portraying them as victims of racism.)

Manalansan's contentions about diversity would be more convincing if he had sought out those of Filipino descent who consider themselves masculine "tops" (insertive rather than receptive in sex) and American-born gay Filipinos, and if he considered that
(1) there is a diversity within the population of gay white males' "living mode"(s!),
(2) many of the icons of American hypermasculinity are black, not white,
and (3) the somatic ideal of the 1990s (when he did his fieldwork) was slender, boyish, and devoid of body hair, an ideal difficult for many Caucasian men to approximate (though not characterizing all GAPI, either).

Manalansan's explications of the lifeways and worldviews of gay Filipino immigrants to New York is more engaging than many ethnographies. It provides compelling challenges to some globalization theorizing, and interesting reflections on the meaning(s) of performing femininity and of national and sexual identifications. My frustrations with unrepresentative sampling, postmodernist jargon, reliance on anecdotage, and uninterest in trying to assess effects of explanatory variables (such as class and country of birth) are triggered by most contemporary ethnographies. A sensitive and assured ethnography, which Global Divas definitely is, suggests major limits of ethnography as a method for explaining diversities of experiences and self-understandings in postmodern cities.


---
© 2004, the Royal Anthropological Institute. Compressed a bit more, this review will appear in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The first GAPI community study, of GAPI organizing in Los Angeles was Eric Wat's The Making of a Gay Asian Community, in which the white gay male "Other" is more differentiated than in Manalansan's book. I have also reviewed (here and in JRAI) an ethnography of gay black men in Harlem: One of the Children by William Hawkeswood.


Recommended: Yes