Bobby Benedicto

Vita

Bobby Benedicto received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne, where he has also lectured on queer cinema, Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. His research on technologies of mobility and contemporary queer world-making practices in Metropolitan Manila has appeared in journals such as GLQ, The Journal of Homosexuality, and Asian Studies Review, among others. Bobby's broader research interests include experimental ethnographic methods, third world cities and architecture, and imaginative geographies. He is presently working on a new project examining the queer uses of dictatorship architecture, based on the recent conversion of Marcos-era modernist structures into sites of Filipino queer performance.

ICI Project (2011-13)

Bright Lights, Gay Globality: Queer World-making in Metropolitan Manila

Bright Lights, Gay Globality is an ethnographic study of mobility, class, and gay life in 21st century Manila. Drawing on postcolonial queer studies and on critical theories of race, affect and mobility, the study traces the emergence of a “bright lights gay scene,” a culturally imaginary space produced by/for privileged Filipino gay men who are simultaneously embedded in a third world city and plugged into a virtual gay globality through teletechnomedia apparatuses. Arising out of tensions between the invincible facticity of location and the never-to-be-completed task of becoming-global, the scene is re-presented in this project as a multistable figure. It appears as an effect of the urban frictions that inspire the making of a first world in the third world, as a space produced in response to dominant heteronormative orders, and as a symptom of the structuring force of fantasy-desires for an always elusive gay modernity. By examining the world-making practices of locally privileged and globally marginal gay men through different spatial registers, the project demonstrates how the figure of the third world queer occupies contradictory positions in incommensurate diagrams of power.