Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous -- “expiation,For,the,sin,of,Nothing”: The Politics of Form in Queer Philippine Poetry in English

Abstract

My thesis comprises a creative and a critical component. The creative component, Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, is a poetry sequence that attends to issues of ageing and desire, in which the human subject is often a riveted but alienated figure. The entries in this major work, many of them prose poems, attempt intimacy and interiority even as their compositional process works against these postures. This process enacts the imbrication of personal concerns, textual realities and lived social conflicts within the sequence. In lightly tracing the narrative and emotive trajectory of its primary source material, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the manuscript moves from dignity to disgrace, arc telegraphed by, among other things, the deferred presence of the “I” pronoun and the vacillations in tone and voice. The exegesis, “expiation,For,the,sin,of,Nothing”: The Politics of Form in Queer Philippine Poetry in English, examines how queerness is transmuted into matters of poetic form. Form, in this context, extends to the architectonic features of poetry, the rhetorical strategies used in it and its methodology, with the social and political dimensions of form functioning as the pivot around which my arguments revolve. The introductory chapter situates the critical and creative endeavours of this thesis within the milieu of Philippine literature. In it, I elaborate on the uneasy position of queer writing relative to a hegemonic narrative that foregrounds the antagonisms between New Critical discourse and socially committed literary production. The first chapter contributes to the revaluation of José Garcia Villa (1908-1997). Contrary to his insistence that poetry must remain cloistered from the intrusion of the political, I complicate Villa’s rarefied aestheticist ideals by reading the formally transgressive features of his poems as queer gestures. Villa’s oeuvre has been disparaged by Filipino critics for its seeming universalism and its maintenance of a narcissistic persona; I analyse how these characteristics become legible through José Esteban Muñoz’s propositions on queer futurity. The second chapter examines the poetry of J. Neil Garcia (b. 1969), a key figure in the emergence of Philippine gay literature. I classify the prominent rhetorical and linguistic elements of Garcia’s poems as manifestations of what Christopher Schmidt calls “waste management poetics,” a category of writing marked by its repudiation of literary and social standards of propriety. By referencing contexts pertinent to the circulation and evaluation of his literary output, I argue that the charismatic wastefulness in Garcia’s poetry sidesteps expectations of profitability. In the concluding chapter, I scrutinise the tendency of my poetry manuscript toward queer coding—a praxis of deliberate obscurity—and textual appropriation as a method of composition. This tendency is a literary response to the state-sponsored exertions of violence in the Philippines; it also refracts my compromised status as a Filipino queer writer committed to queer aestheticism while also troubled by the transvaluation of social relevance into capital. In appraising this tendency, I draw from Lauren Berlant’s notion of the impasse, an affective response to the precarious conditions of the present; thus, I frame my manuscript as an anxious and queer performance of abeyance: a response without resolution.