“What’s (Not) In a Letter? Filipinx, Coloniality, and the Ontologics and Semiotics of Trans Erasure in Online Discourses”

The Department of English and Comparative Literature invites everyone to Dr. Jennifer B. Delfino’s lecture entitled “What’s (Not) In a Letter? Filipinx, Coloniality, and the Ontologics and Semiotics of Trans Erasure in Online Discourses” on Mar. 18, 10 AM via Facebook live.

Though feminist and queer scholars have demonstrated that heteronormative ideologies of gender and sexuality are central to organizing colonial and postcolonial relations of power, the analysis of such ideologies is virtually absent from work on language and colonialism, as is the analysis of the forms of erasure undergirding this ideological work. Centering an analysis of the semiotics and ontologics of trans erasure in postcolonial subject-making, this talk examines a subset of social media posts related to the 2021-2022 online “Filipinx controversy”, which is a debate about the authenticity of ethnonyms Filipino versus Filipinx following the 2021 addition of Filipinx to Dictionary.com. Drawing from postcolonial semiotics (Reyes 2023) and trans linguistics (Zimman 2020), the talk discusses how idealized Filipino identity models reactivate colonial logics of racial, gender, and sexual difference via discourses of “raciolinguistic authenticity”, a concept I propose to describe how raciolinguistic ideologies delimit the discursive construction of linguistic and cultural authenticity to heteronormative perceptions of ways of being and speaking.

The talk will critically examine Filipino discourses of raciolinguistic authenticity from a queer diaspora perspective that centers Filipinx experiences of erasure and transphobia amidst the predominance of claims in social media posts that Filipino is “already gender-neutral,” which come not from Filipinos located in the Philippines, but from cis straight Filipino Americans located in the United States. In highlighting the discursive circulation of anti-Filipinx stances online, this talk interrogates postcolonial perspectives on queerness and transgender identities as exclusively “Western” phenomena that threaten to disrupt Filipino cultural and national authenticity.

Dr. Jennifer B. Delfino is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A Filipino American born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, her research focuses on the impact of racialization, gender, and colonialism on the language practices of minoritized groups in the United States.

She is the author of Speaking of Race: Language, Identity, and Schooling Experiences Among African American Children and several peer-reviewed articles on linguistic and racial formations in liberal democracies. Her forthcoming research explores Ethnic Studies programs and heritage ideologies among Filipino Americans in higher education.

Source: UPD Department of English and Comparative Literature Facebook