The Empire Sings Back: Glee’s Queer Materialization of Filipina/o America

[R]ace only appears when we go looking for it.

—LeiLani Nishime (277)

The meaning of a show is different for different audiences.

—Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (50)

Watching the fall 2010 season premiere of the popular musical television show Glee, I recall wondering, "What is a Filipina doing in Lima, Ohio?" when Sunshine Corazon, a new Philippine exchange student played by Filipina international recording artist Charice Pempengco, sang Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s "Telephone" in the girls’ bathroom with Rachel Berry, William McKinley High’s glee club star whom viewers love to hate. Given the underrepresentation of Filipina/os on mainstream US television, I found Sunshine particularly surprising because she was a featured character and because she was in the Midwest—a part of the country not readily imagined as a place where Asians and Asian Americans live.¹ Five shows later, Blaine Anderson, an attractive, openly gay, and vocally talented student from a rival glee club, The Warblers, captured viewers’ hearts with his rendition of Katy Perry’s "Teenage Dream." Whereas Blaine’s racial-ethnic identity was not made obvious on the show, the Internet was abuzz with reports that the actor who plays Blaine, Darren Criss, is half Filipino, citing Criss’s Twitter page. Together, Sunshine and Blaine dramatize the simultaneous absence and presence of Filipina/os in US national culture and illustrate how race and sexuality continue to be framed as mutually exclusive within popular discourses. More importantly, these two characters invite us to consider the erotics of racial difference and remind us that race continues to play a central role in the visual economy of television despite popular claims that we now live in a post-racial United States.

Focusing on Glee’s second season, in which these two Filipina/o actors debut, this essay explores how Filipina/o-ness simultaneously materializes as queer and materializes queerness, even if the actors do not necessarily play Filipina/os on the show. On the one hand, the presence of Filipina/os on Glee initially seems strange and out of place—in short, queer—because these racially marginal actors occupy center stage, literally through their exceptional vocal performances and symbolically through their unexpected presence in the central part of the country. However, as Sarita Echavez See notes, "‘queer’ in Filipino America denotes a structure of feeling that always is routed through another, usually dominant form or medium" (106). That is, Filipina/o legibility materializes by reworking dominant US culture, and the incorporation of the Filipina/o body into the dominant US cultural imaginary ironically disintegrates Filipina/o status as marginal as well as the coherence of US raciality that excludes Filipina/os (xv). On the other hand, characters played by Filipina/o actors also activate nonnormative forms of desire, thereby reworking the show’s presentation of queer sexuality. By examining how Filipina/o-ness queerly appears and disappears on Glee, I show how visual codes, coupled with aural and linguistic codes, mark bodies unevenly and how the marginal presence of Filipina/os nevertheless transforms the show’s social order.

Although Filipina/o-ness may seem irrelevant to Glee’s popular cultural significance, I focus on it to re-envision the show as a display of US postcoloniality. Such a disidentificatory reading practice locates Filipina/o presence in US popular culture, thereby exposing the pervasiveness of Filipina/os within the US national imaginary despite claims to the contrary.² In addition, I draw particular attention to the peculiarity of Filipina/os in the Midwest, given the predominance of cultural representations that locate Filipina/os only on the West and East Coasts. As scholars such as Oscar V. Campomanes have argued, Filipina/os in the United States are "everywhere and nowhere" (Campomanes qtd. in Balance 88); Allan Punzalan Isaac adds that because the United States wishes to forget its imperial past with the Philippines, Filipina/os seem invisible (xxiii). On Glee, Filipina/os are hard to miss; however, because their Filipina/o identity is not always specified, most viewers do not exhibit the "keen awareness of the smallness and specificity...