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The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

2014; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/anti.12101

1467-8330

Bobby Benedicto,

Socioeconomic Development in Asia

Abstract 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.