Tomboy Ethics: Performances of Care Across the Filipinx Labour Diaspora
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Tomboy Ethics: Performances of Care Across the Filipinx Labour Diaspora is an interdisciplinary study of the everyday, musical, and stage performances of Filipino/a/x tomboys as sites of negotiation and navigation of spaces undergirded by histories of domestic migrant labour within global racial capitalism. Although Filipino/a/x tomboys are often articulated as “butch lesbians” and cast as ancillary figures within scholarship and media, Tomboy Ethics takes seriously tomboyness as a racialized and classed gender-sexual formation as well as an ethical episteme. Throughout this dissertation, I posit what I am calling “tomboy ethics,” which disrupts the flattening of tomboyness into merely a queer aesthetic and instead foregrounds what tomboyness does. I conceptualize tomboy ethics as a disaggregation of domesticity, temporality, sonicity, and corporeality, its reassembly, and subsequent reperformance by Filipino/a/x tomboys. Tomboy ethics operates not as an identitarian or aesthetic category, but as a capacious mode of being in relation, becoming, and doing. Utilizing kwentuhan (Filipino talk-storying), media, discourse, and textual analyses, archival research, as well as feminist, queer, trans, and performance studies approaches, Tomboy Ethics critiques common trends in care work scholarship across numerous fields that focus solely on institutionalized care work by women and feminized caregivers. By closely attending to the performances of tomboys in Baby Ruth Villarama’s documentary Sunday Beauty Queen (2016), tomboy celebrities on local and global stages, in music videos, and in stories of accessing gender-affirming care in Canada, this dissertation argues that tomboy ethics are crucial and necessary means through which tomboys navigate and negotiate gendered spaces with longer histories of domestic migrant labour. These ways of knowing established by tomboys ensure their individual survival as well as the survival of other minoritarian diasporic subjects as they move within and through spatialities marked by racial and global capital. Further, the stage, musical, and quotidian performances that tomboys engage in through their mobilization of tomboy ethics offer alternative ways to conceptualize care within and outside of infrastructures of global care work.