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The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification
Author(s) -
Benedicto Bobby
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12101
Subject(s) - beautification , queer , modernity , afterlife , perversion , sociology , aesthetics , modernism (music) , authoritarianism , power (physics) , ridiculous , art , gender studies , democracy , literature , law , politics , political science , civil engineering , physics , quantum mechanics , engineering
This paper examines how queer practices of transformation enable the preservation and perversion of the logics, aspirations, and violences that animated Imelda Marcos's “war of urban beautification”. It traces conceptual overlaps between the notions of truth and beauty that underpinned Imelda's faith in architectural modernism and which operate in the sex/gender tradition of kabaklaan . Using the case study of the Manila Film Center, a formerly abandoned and famously haunted Marcos‐era building that has been transformed into the host site of a “transgender” revue, the paper demonstrates how queerness, necropower, architecture, and dreams of urban and global modernity come together through the spatial effects of authoritarian power.