Week 5 Day 1

 

“Stars — they’re just like us!”

    This long-running US Weekly article does exactly as its title suggests; it shows celebrities doing mundane tasks in order to make them more relatable to “us.” However, showing a celebrity grabbing a latte from Starbucks is a far cry from demonstrating their relatability to non-celebs, and the construction of relatability obscures the reality that these people are, for the most part, nothing like us. In a similar fashion, the binarisms in gender and sexuality studies that see understandings of gay and lesbian non-Westerners as “indigenous or Western imports” make invisible the complexity of these subject positions (Boellstroff, 237).

    In the “Stars — they’re just like us!” articles, paparazzi photos of celebrities working out, taking selfies, and going to the library headline as newsworthy. However, the irony is that many of the things they do that the article claims makes them “just like us” are things many Americans cannot afford to do. For example, a photo of Karlie Kloss taking a selfie (which many people do) is taken on the set of her Adidas campaign (which many people do not do). Many similar iterations of this pattern — showing a celebrity doing something simple within the context of their wealth and business opportunities — appear on the column. By simplifying the actions these celebrities perform into things that are “like us” and then necessitated “not like us,” US Weekly constructs a binary that removes the celebrity from the us. It completely overlooks the relevance of class and privilege in the photos they claim to depict show celebrities being “like us.”

    As both Boellstroff and Manalansan demonstrate in their writing, queer identities in non-Western countries (specifically South Asian) do not exist solely due to Western globalization or as a “premodern antecedent to gay,” (Manalansan, 21). The “failure... to set forth any theorization of the Southeast Asian gay subject that does not presume inauthenticity, complicity, or domination [by presumed Western precedents],” as claimed by Boellstroff, may be a result of American-centered thought, as well as the misconception that globalization is a homogenizing, Americanizing phenomenon. In reality, cultural globalization can be viewed as a “localizing process” where local identities present before and after globalization are neither erased nor replaced by dominant Western identities and practices. An example of this comes from Manalansan writing on the distinctions between bakla and gay. Bakla has been translated by some to mean homosexual, but the local construction of the term carries a conflation between “effeminacy, transvestism, and homosexuality,” and the term can mean one or all of those things depending on the context (Manalansan, 25). Simply translating bakla as gay assumes that the word would encompass the same people and define them in a way similar to how gay defines people in America. Ignoring the local social construction of bakla and deeming it to be synonymous and/or interchangeable with gay conceals the social significance of the term and assumes all “gay” men to be alike. Similarly, examining gay Filipino men without understanding the term bakla leads to a one-dimensional analysis.

    For example, Filipino gay men find coming out to be a “foreign thing — totally American and not at all Filipino,” (Manalansan, 33). Manalansan provides many examples as to why this is; many felt as though verbalization was “superfluous,” and others had to align their gay self-identity with their identity as an immigrant along with bakla culture. Ignoring these differences between American and Filipino gay men is akin to ignoring the differences between yourself and a celebrity claimed to be just like you. You both may have bought a Starbucks latte, but your $5.00 latte is a luxury, while hers is an afterthought.

    This is not to say that globalization and Western identities do not affect local identities in non-Western countries. As Boellstroff points out, “lesbi and gay Indonesians dub ‘Western’ sexual subject positions,” (Boellstroff, 237). When “dubbing” something, it is reworked within a new context that preserves authenticity while adding new ones. Therefore, lesbi and gay subjects exist outside Western determinism, but also remain “shaped by a discourse originating in the ‘West’ and filtered through a nationalistic lens,” (Boellstroff, 237). Therefore, globalization and Western identity are not effectless, but are also not homogenizing forces, as mentioned previously. Would it be incorrect to claim that lesbi and gay identities live on the border between globalization and indigenization? Does this question reconstruct the binary we want to dismantle?

    Either way, overlooking differences can lead to an oversimplified understanding of different subjects. Just as claiming “Stars — they’re just like us!” overlooks the numerous differences between celebrities and non-celebrities, defining all “gay” men with the American gay identity dismisses the local identities and their significance.