Post-1997 gay cinema of Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines

Abstract

This thesis explores the notion of what I call “homonormative economic familialism” in selected post-1997 gay-themed films from Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Drawing primarily from Lisa Duggan’s and Susan Stryker’s diverging and converging definitions of homonormativity, I define “homonormative economic familialism” as both a worldview and as a procedure of cinematic analysis which focuses on the creative ways in which post-1997 gay cinema transforms the gay subject into an economic agent within the structure of the family. Homonormative economic familialism in this regard is a mode of sexual citizenship within the paradigms of neoliberalism, one that neutralizes the radicalizing potential of queer politics in favor of market-oriented legibility as this is deployed as an ethics of sonhood. Of particular interest to this thesis is how this notion is deployed within the traffic of transnational cinematic texts and how the circulating narratives and privileged articulations regarding sexual citizenship are appropriated and deployed for massified consumption and interpellation.

The thesis thus explores the ways in which this notion is reproduced in various post-1997 cinematic texts, the specific post-crisis political and economic conditions that enabled such a pattern to emerge, and the encrypted interventions regarding sexual citizenship such reproductions are making in their own specific contexts. In the Thai case, homonormative economic familialism refers to the negotiations between, on the one hand, the promise of queer cosmopolitanism brought about by the opening of transnational traffic, and on the other, the heteronationalist paradigms advocated by the regime of Thaksin Shinawatra. In the Hong Kong case, homonormative economic familialism is deployed within the grid of the entanglements that define post-1997 Hong Kong cinema’s politics: economic concerns regarding housing, the apparent decline of Cantonese popular culture, and the turn towards transnational co-productions. Post-1997 gay cinema thus assembles and consolidates these issues towards a singular, embodied thrust in the form of a gay subject who has combined the Confucian notions of kinship with a “queer” sexual subjectivity that functions “productively” in the post-crisis, post-Handover context. In the Philippine case, post-1997 gay cinema draws its thematic framework from the land-based feudalism that has since structured Philippine society from the Spanish colonial period to its post-colonial, neocolonial present.

The thesis is thus interested in the ways in which the radicalizing potential of queer politics is neutralized for a bioethical framework that displaces transformative and transgressive politics in favor of legibility within the paradigms of neoliberal governmentality.