Interview with Professor Martin Manalansan: “Thinking Otherwise” about Entrenched Fields that Were Once Marginalized

I recently had the opportunity to interview Professor Martin Manalansan, a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Professor Manalansan also previously taught anthropology, Asian American Studies, and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of the Philippines, New York University, New School University, and the City University of New York. He is currently researching marginalized populations, such as undocumented queer immigrants.

His bio reads:

“I am an interdisciplinary queer studies scholar trained in cultural anthropology and philosophy. I am interested in the study of minoritarian quotidian experiences of vulnerability, contingency, intimacy, and the infra-ordinary. I am indebted to and heavily influenced by the works of fellow travelers and colleagues who have developed and animated queer of color critique as well as queer global Asias frameworks. My writing and research trace the intersections between migration, sexuality, race, class, and gender with a special focus on Asian Americans as well as Filipinx communities in the United States and the Philippines and the diasporic “elsewheres.”” (bio and photo from Rutgers University Directory)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the fields of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies; Anthropology; and Asian American studies? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities? Why do you think it’s important to study these topics simultaneously? 

I started my research around the second decade of the AIDS pandemic, which was in the 90s. What interested me was how studies of Filipino gay men (who at that time had the highest number of cases among Asian Americans) and those of AIDS and immigrant populations intersected in interesting ways. Specifically, in terms of Asian American immigrants, race, sexuality, and gender are entangled in interesting ways with each other. I started my research on Filipino gay men, most of whom were immigrants. I wasn't trained in Asian American studies - I was trained in anthropology - but most of my interlocutors were in gender, women's studies, and Asian American studies. So, even though my disciplinary training was in cultural anthropology, I see my work as engaging with a wider field of gender sexuality, LGBT Queer Studies, and Asian American studies, as well as ethnic studies and critical race studies. 

What were your motivations for writing your 5 anthologies and how do you see them building off of each other? 

At the end of the day, it really boils down to this question: how do we address issues of marginalized people? My first anthology was on the ethnography of Asian American communities, specifically the way in which ethnography conveys a more nuanced view of these communities. 

My other anthology involved queer globalization. It was written at the moment when people were seeing the way in which gay and lesbian politics was being globalized. Its dissemination was uneven queer globalization was about the evenness of what people are calling the dissemination and expansion of LGBTQ+ politics and cultures. That anthology was based on a conference in New York City. 

I also wrote an anthology based on a conference that focused on Filipino American Studies; Philippine Studies was the most under-studied in the fields of Asian and Asian American study at this time. So, this was an intervention.

I also published an anthology on food and Asian Americans, which I think tackles age-old links—very disturbing links—between food and Asian Americans. It discussed the way in which food as a tool for facile multiculturalism can be troubled or unraveled through the kinds of scholarship that the anthology was doing. We're actually doing a second volume of that, which hopefully will come out early next year if possible. 

The last anthology was about how Manila is seen as marginalized in a way in which urban modernity is constructed because Manila is always seen as the counterexample of urban modernity. 

The anthologies, books, and essays that I write are really about thinking through these entangled webs of relationships that come under particular categories—very porous categories of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. I think my work as an anthropologist, as a queer studies scholar, and as a scholar from migration, and race and critical ethnic studies, offers readers a glimpse of how to step back a bit and evaluate what we take for granted as normal. The unmaking of common sense is my attempt to critique current political and social attitudes.

Can you please speak more about your editing of the International Migration Review volume on gender and migration? What specific material was discussed in this?

What is really important to note is that we, the co-editors, all agreed on one thing in particular: that gender is not does not equal women, but rather the relationship between genders. The collection special issue of IMR was an attempt to look at the social science research on gender. One of the things we realized is that there was an amazing, emerging literature on women as gender that was in many ways restrictive. So, the anthology was meant really a critique of standard social science research on gender.

One of my co-editors, who is a demographer and a quantitative social scientist, said that what is interesting in quantitative methods and statistics is that they calcify gender into two variables: men and women. Therefore, it does not recognize how gender does not only mean cisgender people. It also creates a kind of separation, by implying that men and women are two separate populations that don’t interact in many ways. It conveys that each gender is constructed on its own, and not through interaction. One of our goals was to counteract this. 

By the end of the 20th century, what was interesting is that quantitatively more women were moving around, so the mobility of women was at the utmost. So, general views became so narrow; they thought of women, migrants, care workers, etc without thinking of the histories and cultures that constructed gendered meanings and gendered practices. So, in that IMR issue, we were really taking stock. Rather than being passive and just examining what had already been written, we also thought about what needed to be done, and what the limits and potentials were of literature at that point in time.

What are your goals for how you hope to see your current book projects on undocumented queer immigrants and Asian American immigrant culinary cultures develop, specifically within the next few months or during the summer?

Both are actually pretty much in their last stages. 

The book about undocumented immigrants is not actually what social scientists would call a macro study, but rather a micro one. It involves a household of six undocumented immigrants. What I wanted to do is to offer a glimpse of the everyday life of this household, rather than providing a comprehensive study. I wanted to think in terms of what people might call “larger issues” or “issues that have been enduring” questions around how people live together. How do people live, in terms of the grit and grime of working-class undocumented immigrants in the city of New York? I'm thinking about the ways in which American history views immigrant houses, apartments, and domiciles as racialized ghettos but also more importantly, sites of dirt, disease, and moral decay. If you look at Chinatown or the Jewish tenements in New York City, we can see how these represent the spatialized materialization of people and there are racial, ethnic, religious, and gendered notions of foreigners. It’s how foreigners are seen in terms of their domesticity, and their ability to live despite the so-called decrepit conditions. In many ways, it's like a counter to the home and garden variety of modern home life. In fact, immigrant houses are in fact seen as virtually anti-modern or pre-modern spaces of domesticity itself. I'm looking not just at the space but also at the way people think about their lives and each other in ways that are a bit counterintuitive. Inasmuch as people want to impute a kind of emotional closeness, traditional social science, literature, and stereotypical notions of immigrant families are this: they're not American, they're very close, they're so involved with family, and their households are so tightly bound. What I'm offering is a counter-example, where people have very loose, almost disaffected, relationships with each other, but it works. I'm trying to give a counter-example to these idealized notions of domesticity and ways of life, and also the ways in which suffering and oppression are not dead ends, but rather pivots towards alternative possible lives. 

In a nutshell, the food book continues with a critique of the current, mainstream notion of food as just pleasure and entertainment. It actually unravels the notion that “you are what to eat.” To us that kind of a limited but also quite violent notion about the attachment of “being” and personhood to food. There's a limit to how you can connect them, but it also leads to fast-side multiculturalism, palatable multiculturalism that does not erase inequality (such as by saying “I like Chinese food so I am not racist.”). It imbues the person with a certain kind of cosmopolitanism that denies the troubling background of racism, inequality, xenophobia, etc.

How do you see these as well as your other current book projects working in conjunction with your previous interdisciplinary research on gender, race, and migration? Do they relate to your research on care, senses, and feelings?

I've always been fascinated by domesticity. In fact, a special issue about queer domesticity in JLQ is in-press now and will come out early next year. Basically, domesticity at first glance seems to be a well-defined notion of “tameness.” What does it mean to domesticate? It means to make one free of the wildness and chaos of the public, right? The definition of domestic is actually shifting, both historically and spatially. Depending on the scale of what you think is domestic, it could describe a nation, a house, a homeless shelter, etc. Most people say domesticity can not exist without a house or a home, and I think that's our way of “queering.” Queer to me is not an identity, but a portal to thinking otherwise. It’s thinking beyond the normative. We think of domesticity as the very doormat of normativity. That's why people will say, “Your house is your kingdom.” That notion denies the idea that people have unequal access to these kinds of idealized notions of domesticity, and mostly impossible kinds of domesticity. 

In both books, I'm trying to reject the idea of food as always just a pleasurable thing. Rather, I depict it as an object and set of practices that are imbued with ideological elements. As Queer Studies scholars, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies scholars, we're tasked to think beyond these prescribed concepts. One way of connecting Queer Studies and Critical Race, and Ethnic studies, ethnic studies, is going beyond the status quo and “thinking otherwise.”

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

I’m sorry, I'm very bad with blogs and podcasts. Otherwise, I know that Judith Butler just published a new book called “Who's Afraid of Gender” and it addresses the current climate of people questioning trans people and the dangers of questioning gender. It also slips into sexuality; I always say gender and sexuality are inextricably bound, but oftentimes in problematic ways.

For the moment, I'm interested in the age-old topic of drag. People tend to associate drag immediately with RuPaul’s Drag Race. I think RuPaul's Drag Race is an interesting mainstream pop culture commodification of drag. I've been talking to my students and also authors about drag in the past few weeks, which is why I’m mentioning it. Drag is seen as the ultimate evil in this current political climate because it disrupts our traditional notions of gender. People always tend to say that drag queens = trans = homosexuality, which we know is a bad equation.

Is there anything that you want to bring up that we didn't already discuss? 

I think that we're at a moment where the institutionalization of formerly marginalized fields like Critical Race Studies, Queer Studies, LGBTQ Studies, and Women's Studies are entrenched. In one way or the other, they are being institutionalized and legitimated. As a counter, what we have in the political climate is a kind of conservative, revengeful movement towards destabilizing and deinstitutionalizing them. To quote Judith Butler, I think the current political climate is fearful of gender.