Thursday, November 7, 2024 1:00pm to 2:00pm
About this Event
Mobile digital technologies are transforming how people communicate with one another. They offer a promise for quick and easy platonic, romantic, and/or sexual connections. With the intensification of people’s reliance on and everyday engagement
with mobile digital media platforms, the study of mediated intimacies is relevant and needed more than ever before. Spanning several years of ethnographic research, both in Manila and Los Angeles, queer Filipinx/a/o men in my study complained that it was difficult to find meaningful connections through socio-sexual apps. In their pursuits of intimacies, queer Filipinx/a/o men in my study experienced frequent forms of failure, generating various affective responses that shape their actions and beliefs. In the accounts of these experiences, failure is not a totalizing experience. Nor do these experiences necessarily lead to definite endpoints. Such possibilities still create many forms of exclusions to intimacy, yet the queer Filipinx/a/o men who shared parts of their lives continue to aspire, to hope for an experience of intimacy. Some openings and possibilities inspire responses and alternative paths toward the realization of brief moments of connection, and small moments of pleasure. My study seeks to understand queer Filipinx/a/o men’s digital lives and how their experiences inform complex negotiations on and offline in the search for connection, especially when feelings are amplified and complicated by social categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.
Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, Ph.D. (any pronouns) is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality at Cal Poly Humboldt. They teach courses in Asian/American Studies, transnational gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, media and cultural studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Select scholarly work has been published in Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, Beauty and Brutality: Manila and its Global Discontents, in addition to the International Journal of Communication and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Their creative writing is included in With Love: What We Wish We Knew About Being Queer and Filipino in America. A collaborator with performance artist Maria Arte Susya Purisima Tolentino or Ma. Arte for short (formerly Aloha Tolentino), they use the form of drag to analyze transnational media representations and discourse about the lives of Filipina/o/x people.
Please let us know if you require an accommodation in order to participate in this event. Accommodations may include live captioning, ASL interpreters, and/or captioned media and accessible documents from recorded events. At least 5 days in advance is recommended.