Under Bright Lights vividly describes the emergence in twenty-first century Manila of a “bright lights” scene: a world composed of dance clubs, upmarket bars, party circuits, and other commercial sites that evoke images of a gay globe, but which remain bound to a landscape of disorder, mass poverty, and urban decay. Benedicto argues that queer world-making practices sustain elite desires for global modernity and the class, gender, and racial orders that structure urban life in the post-colony. Further, Benedicto analyzes how the fantasy of global gay modernity is imperiled during touristic jou ... More

Under Bright Lights vividly describes the emergence in twenty-first century Manila of a “bright lights” scene: a world composed of dance clubs, upmarket bars, party circuits, and other commercial sites that evoke images of a gay globe, but which remain bound to a landscape of disorder, mass poverty, and urban decay. Benedicto argues that queer world-making practices sustain elite desires for global modernity and the class, gender, and racial orders that structure urban life in the post-colony. Further, Benedicto analyzes how the fantasy of global gay modernity is imperiled during touristic journeys to global cities, when privileged gay men from Manila encounter Filipino labor migrants in sites of transit and come face-to-face with the exclusionary racial orders that operate in gay spaces overseas. By implicating queer practices of mobility in local and transnational cultures of domination, Bright Lights, Gay Globality challenges popular interpretations of the “third world” queer as a necessarily radical figure. It puts into question the theories of alternative modernity that have dominated research on postcolonial cities, interrogates the idealization of movement in the study of non-normative sexualities, and complicates Euro-American efforts to unpack queer complicities with neoliberal culture.