- Thea Quiray Tagle "It’s Not Right But It’s Okay: Queer Filipino Performances of (Un)Dead Black Divas"
- Manan Desai "Bamboo and Brass: The Sexual Politics of Exotica’s Asia"
- Brian Su-Jen Chung "Back to School: The University of Hawaii and Queer Indie Music Scene-making in Honolulu"
Moderator: Ashon Crawley
This trio of presentations traverses multiple geographies and histories of queer sound and performance in the mainland United States, Hawai’i and the Pacific, and Asia. Our work explores several modes through which diasporic amateur and professional artists in these spaces labor to imagine the social, racial, and sexual Other-as-Themselves through music-making and live performance. Manan Desai’s paper on the mid-century “Exotica” genre in the United States investigates the Cold War fantasies of mastery over Asia and Asian people which were played out in its consumption and production. Thea Quiray Tagle considers drag performances by queer Filipinos that turn African American divas into the undead as fantastic, yet prescient, spectacles that warn us all of our impending destruction. Brian Chung, meanwhile, looks to the indie music scene in Hawai’i as a site for queer worldmaking that transforms the islands from a tourist trap to an indigenous place. Together, our work tries to disrupt the borders between producer and consumer; original and copy; foreign and native in order to complicate the ways that we understand how individuals and collectives produce resistant sexual and racial identities and landscapes through performance and sound.