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Filipino Crosscurrents
Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization
Kale Bantigue Fajardo
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Filipino seamen currently compose approximately twenty percent of the 1.2 million international maritime transportation workers. Ninety percent of the world’s goods and commodities are transported by ship. Taken together, these statistics attest to the critical role Filipino seamen play in worldwide maritime trade. In Filipino Crosscurrents, an interdisciplinary ethnography, Kale Bantigue Fajardo examines the cultural politics of seafaring, Filipino maritime masculinities, and globalization in the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted on ships and in the ports of Manila and Oakland, as well as on an industrial container ship that traveled across the Pacific, Fajardo argues that Filipino seamen have become key figures through which the Philippine state and economic elites promote Filipino masculinity and neoliberal globalization. From government officials to working-class seamen and seafarers’ advocates, Fajardo’s wide-ranging analysis exposes the gaps in dominant narratives of Filipino seamen in national, regional, and global contexts.

Writing in a hybrid style that weaves together ethnographic description, cultural critique, travelogue, and autobiography, Fajardo invites readers to reconsider the meanings of masculinity and manhood.

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Q&A
Voices from Queer Asian North America
Edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Alice Y. Hom, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo
Temple University Press, 2021

First published in 1998, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, became a canonical work in Asian American studies and queer studies. This new edition of Q & A is neither a sequel nor an update, but an entirely new work borne out of the progressive political and cultural advances of the queer experiences of Asian North American communities. 

The artists, activists, community organizers, creative writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists that contribute to this exciting new volume make visible the complicated intertwining of sexuality with race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Sections address activism, radicalism, and social justice; transformations in the meaning of Asian-ness and queerness in various mass media issues of queerness in relation to settler colonialism and diaspora; and issues of bodies, health, disability, gender transitions, death, healing, and resilience.

The visual art, autobiographical writings, poetry, scholarly essays, meditations, and analyses of histories and popular culture in the new Q & Agesture to enduring everyday racial-gender-sexual experiences of mis-recognition, micro-aggressions, loss, and trauma when racialized Asian bodies are questioned, pathologized, marginalized, or violated. This anthology seeks to expand the idea of Asian and American in LGBTQ studies.

Contributors: Marsha Aizumi, Kimberly Alidio, Paul Michael (Mike) Leonardo Atienza, Long T. Bui, John Paul (JP) Catungal, Ching-In Chen, Jih-Fei Cheng, Kim Compoc, Sony Coráñez Bolton, D’Lo, Patti Duncan, Chris A. Eng, May Farrales, Joyce Gabiola, C. Winter Han, Douglas S. Ishii, traci kato-kiriyama, Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Mimi Khúc, Anthony Yooshin Kim, Việt Lê, Danni Lin, Glenn D. Magpantay, Leslie Mah, Casey Mecija, Maiana Minahal, Sung Won Park, Thea Quiray Tagle, Emily Raymundo, Vanita Reddy, Eric Estuar Reyes, Margaret Rhee, Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, Pahole Sookkasikon, Amy Sueyoshi, Karen Tongson, Kim Tran, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Reid Uratani, Eric C. Wat, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Syd Yang, Xine Yao, and the editors

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