Potholes of the Past: Incorporable Neoliberal Identities, & Trans-Temporality's Affects in R. Zamora Linmark's Leche

Department: Film and Media Studies

Date and Time: May 24, 2017 | 11:00 AM-12:30 PM

Event Location: HG 1341

Event Details


Please join us for a Critical Voices Workshop

Potholes of the Past: Incorporable Neoliberal Identities, & Trans-Temporality’s Affects in R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche
Dr. Jacob Lau
Commentary by Prof. Christine Balance (Asian American Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies)

Light lunch provided. Please RSVP (required) to robledj1@uci.edu by Monday, May 22nd to receive a copy of Dr. Lau’s paper. 

This paper is a trans-temporal reading of R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche (2011), a postmodern novel exploring questions of memory and haunting, mixed race and queer identity in the context of the protagonist’s return to the Philippines after a thirteen year absence. The second part of a duology begun with Rolling the R’s (1995), Leche follows Vincente De Los Reyes’s discovery of his mixed race heritage and the unearthing of his melancholia for his deceased grandfather, a former WWII veteran, through his affective memories of both the beginnings of his queerness and his complicated relationship to the U.S. and the Philippines. This paper articulates Lau’s methodology of trans-temporality, and comes from his book project’s final chapter, which seeks to articulate the superstructure of cis (not trans) normative time as operative on those narratives, bodies, and lives that do not fall under the rubric of transgender through its imbrications with transnational neoliberalism.

Jacob R. Lau is UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Film and Media Studies at UCI (mentor: Prof. Fatimah Tobing Rony). Lau received his Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA and holds a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, as well as a M.T.S. in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion from Harvard Divinity School. Along with Cameron Partridge, he is the editor of Dr. Laurence Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka's 1962 memoir Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (Fordham University Press, 2016) for which he also co-authored an introduction.

Co-sponsored by Film & Media Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies

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