Martin Manalansan
Hope in Sunless Worlds: The Horizon of Queer Immigrant Domiciles
Immigrant homes have historically been perceived as the sites of moral degradation, disease, and crime. From Chinatown to the Italian and Jewish ghettos in Manhattan's lower east side to COVID newspaper dispatches during COVID about immigrants in Queens neighborhoods, immigrant domestic spaces in New York City have been deemed as dirty, dismal, and dangerous examples of improper and impossible ways of life. Culling from ethnographic research, this presentation aims to re-frame queer immigrant lives as hopeful and imaginative forms of socialities and domesticity.
MARTIN MANALANSAN is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is president-elect of the Association for Asian American Studies. Manalansan is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2003; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006), recipient of the Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association, and is the editor/co-editor of several anthologies and journal special issues, including Beauty and Brutality: Manila and Its Global Discontents (Temple University Press, 2023), Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (Temple University Press, 2021), Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press, 2016), Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013), and Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York University Press, 2002), among others. Manalansan is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Modern Language Association's Crompton-Noll Award for best LGBTQ essay (2016), the American Studies Association's Richard Yarborough Mentoring Prize (2016), and the Association of Asian American Studies Excellence in Mentorship Award (2013). Manalansan's current book projects include the ethical and embodied dimensions of the lives and struggles of undocumented queer immigrants, Asian American immigrant culinary cultures, affect and nationalism, urban studies, and the politics of decolonizing social science in the Global South.
