Organizer: Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University
Lecture Series: Gatty Lecture Series
Description:
Kale Bantigue Fajardo is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Fajardo completed his undergraduate studies Cornell (Developmental Psychology/Feminist Studies/Southeast Asian Studies) and his MA and PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Fajardo is the author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization (2011) and a Co-Editor of Q&A: Queer Voices from Asian North America (2021.) He has been published in books and journals such as Mains'l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History; Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity; Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora; GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies; and The Transgender Reader 2; among others. He has a new essay in Hydro-Humanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures (2021.) Fajardo is currently a Deputy Editor at The Island Studies Journal, a member of the editorial board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago.
In this talk, Fajardo will lecture on different kinds of boats, waters, and queer river-and-seafaring Filipino/a/x figures in contemporary Philippine Cinema. He will specifically discuss and closely read films such as Sagwan (Oar/Paddle) (2009), Marino (Seaman) (2009), Muro-Ami (Reef Hunters) (1999) and Thy Womb (2012), and he will draw from Southeast Asian/Philippine/global maritime histories of seafaring, boat-building, and fishing and queer/trans/feminist theories, as well as oceanic/archipelagic/island studies. In doing so, Fajardo will reveal the postcolonial and decolonial implications of these films in relation to indigeneity, tourism, neoliberal economics, global Filipino/a/x migration, and heteropatriarchy.
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