Title Caliguia, GR. “Visibilizing Queer Futures Past.” Visual Resources 37, no. 4 (2021), 248–271.pdf ✅

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gvir20 Visual Resources an international journal on images and their uses ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/gvir20 Visibilizing Queer Futures Past: Ekphrasis and LGBTQIA + Representation in the Philippine Archive Gregorio R. Caliguia III To cite this article: Gregorio R. Caliguia III (2021) Visibilizing Queer Futures Past: Ekphrasis and LGBTQIA + Representation in the Philippine Archive, Visual Resources, 37:4, 248-271, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2023.2249719 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2023.2249719 Published online: 25 Sep 2023. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 395 View related articles View Crossmark data
Visibilizing Queer Futures Past: Ekphrasis and LGBTQIA + Representation in the Philippine Archive Gregorio R. Caliguia III This article interrogates how both visual culture and queer futurity can be made visible in and through the Philippine archive as a case in point. It begins by problematizing a paradoxical specter of futurity that seems to haunt more the Global North. But despite such haunting, the Philippines in the Global South continues to have thin to nil (i.e., nearly absent) envisioning toward a queer futurity, for most Filipino LGBTQIA + scholars seem to still be engaged in recovering “lost histories” from the archives and “thick descriptions” of the present, while focusing more on the textual than the visual. The article then proceeds to discuss mobilizing ekphrasis and representation as main conceptual tools in bridging the temporally opposite projects of queer archiving and queer futurity. It analyzes through ekphrastic re-reading the various LGBTQIA + representations from the Philippine archive – that is, a “palimpsestic site” of colonial confrontations, national (re)construction, and potentially global queer critique. These re-readings along the archival grain juxtapose the archival representations as historically authentic vis-à-vis their more present-day representations as visual proxies. Yet more crucially, the potency of these ekphrastic re- readings – in lieu of visually actual – lies in their capacity to reverberate queer possibilities, re-awakening them from their sleep within the archives, and thus re-mobilizing them toward becoming a useful part of academics, activists, and artists’ “shared arsenal” in re- envisioning and, hopefully in time, reifying such past possibilities into future queer actualities anew. Keywords: Ekphrasis; Representation; Queer Futurity; Multimedia; Global South; LGBTQIA + Historiography Introduction In today’s context of global capitalist disparity, Global North scholarship on futurity tends to envision the future as a distinct temporality – that is, separable from the past and extractable from the present – while its particular segment queer futurity has become polarized between those who are optimistic of queer futurity as here and now and those who deny queer any future at all. However, despite these debates above, the Philippines in the Global South – e.g., Asia-Pacific, Africa, South Visual Resources, Volume 37, Number 4, December 2021 ISSN 0197-3762 © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2023.2249719
America – continues to have thin to nil (i.e., nearly absent) envisioning toward a queer1 futurity. Most Filipino LGBTQIA + scholars seem to still ben engaged in recov- ering “lost histories” from the archives and “thick descriptions” of the present, on one hand, and are focusing more on modalities of the textual than the visual, on the other. Amid these split-level visions between North and South, this paper interrogates how both visual culture and queer futurity can be made visible in and through the Philippine archive as a case in point. This critique, more crucially, intimates how textual materials – in lieu of visually actual – can offer access to past visual cultures. Guiding this investigation are these questions: How can we visibilize the queer in the periods of history without accessible visual resources? Is a visual necessarily an imagery? Can words be “visual”? How much of the reconstructable LGBTQIA + his- tories and representations can be considered “authentic”? And, ultimately, can the archive – the oft-assumed domain of the past, the old, and the historical – envision imageries of alternative queer futures, and if so, how? The first part of the paper dissects its theoretical framework: from explaining how ekphrasis serves in visibilizing the visual from the predominantly textual nature of the archive down to clarifying how representation operates as a simultaneity of either–or “authentic” and “proxy,” 2 leading to a methodological argument (based on Bifo Berar- di’s futurability) as to how queer futurity can be tracked along the archival grain.3 The second part demonstrates samples of ekphrastic re-readings of LGBTQIA + represen- tations from the Philippine archive, and then juxtaposes these archival representations- as-authentic vis-à-vis their more present-day representation-as-proxy in multimedia such as graphic arts, films, and photographs. Finally, the paper concludes by pulling together the strings of multiple yet immiscible temporalities, both the archival and the futural, emphasizing how ekphrastic re-readings reveal that sex, gender, and sex- uality are never stable, whose mobilities and shifts not only visibilize various imageries of alternative queer futures from the archives, but also evincing that the Global South can, too, engage in rendering queer futurity imaginable and, in time, actualizable. (Queer) Futurity as a Specter of the Global North–South Divide A paradoxical specter of futurity seems to haunt more the Global North – e.g., Europe, North America, Australia – at present. “Paradoxical” it is, for as Franco “Bifo” Berardi described it, almost prophetically, the present global capitalist order witnesses what he termed the “slow cancellation of the future.” 4 That is, any envisioning of what the future may hold seems ironically unimaginable for the Global North today. Expressed alternatively but more polemically, Hito Steyerl blames this haunting paradox on the past, proclaiming that the “future only exists if the past is prevented from permanently leaking into the present” [emphasis added].5 Prima facie, Steyerl’s polemic goes against the grain of cultural theorist Frederic Jameson’s call to “always historicize.” 6 Yet often cited symptoms of this futural cancellation are the almost repetitive revivalisms of music and aesthetic genres from the 1970s and 1980s, which the present generation rehashed as “retro.” In the same vein are the persisting nostalgia for these bygone styles, and the oft-surprise of many in the present when they realize how decades- old distant were the 1990s and back from the vantage point of today. Visibilizing Queer Futures Past 249
While wider discourses on the “slow cancellation of the future” center on aesthet- ics, queer scholars of the Global North nonetheless concern themselves with the re- fractions within queer communities as caused by the HIV-AIDS epidemic since the 1980s. The haunting specter of HIV-AIDS has dichotomized, almost as a parallax view, any queer envisioning of the future. One camp holds a rather negative view toward the future, and another remains hopeful. From the negative camp comes Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay “Is Rectum a Grave?,” which had laid out the earlier premises of this queer negativity toward the future. However, it was Lee Edelman’s book No Future that disturbed the queer visions of any future, hence birthing what became known to be the anti-relational thesis in queer theory.7 Harbingers of the anti-rela- tional thesis propose a sense of “queer unbelonging.” Queer unbelonging’s initial concern is to reject the need to affirm one’s social connections, thereby dismissing one’s subjectification under social institutions such as marriage, having children, se- curing one’s health and longevity, and preserving one’s assets for the next generation. One can immediately sense that this notion of queer unbelonging would entail a simultaneous denial and deconstruction of what became termed chrono-normativity – i.e., a linear, orderly, and forward-moving vision of one’s lifetime. Nonetheless, across the nearly darkening horizons of no-future glows hope, lighted by the late Jose Estaban Muñoz, who advanced the notion of potentialities. Muñoz clarified, however, that potentiality – although present – does not exist in the exact spatio-temporal actuality (i.e., here and now) of the present, but rather hovers over another temporality that can be called futurity. Although aligning with Muñoz’s optimistic visions of queer futurity, Angela Jones grounds the potential for queer futurity rather in the everyday queer practices. This grounding, in a sense, par- allels Neferti X.M. Tadiar’s more inclusive notion that the “political seeds of alterna- tive future” are incubated in the everyday acts of resistance, which were often dismissed as things fall away or marginalized from being valued in today’s neoliberal Global North–South divide.8 But it is critical to note that the preoccupation over queer futurity nearly exclu- sively within the Global North unfolds how queer futurity is itself a specter of the ma- terial and epistemic imbalances between Global North and South. For instance, although some Global-South–raised yet North–trained Filipino intellectuals such as Neferti X.M. Tadiar, Bliss Cua-Lim, and Bobby Benedicto can be said to be working on futurity,9 these intellectuals arguably embody a parallax perspective.10 “Parallax” – simply put, a refracted vision – transpires as they stand between the uneven fields of global intellectual economy, with one foot rooting their critical anal- ysis in the Global South, yet the other benefitting from their tenured positions and academic networks in the Global North. Interestingly, although these Global- North–based Filipino scholars embody an apparent liminality – if not a likewise “queer unbelonging” – within Philippine studies, their parallax positionalities in and against both the local and global have rather generated “more pluralized” conver- sations in the field.11 Notwithstanding, their liminality, being persistently critiqued by Philippine-based scholars, is arguably what renders their scholarship and positional- ities largely “queered” (i.e., questioning their rigor) and “un-belonged” (i.e., question- ing their relevance). 250 Caliguia