Desiring sameness: globalization, agency, and the Filipino gay imaginary

This article grapples with the issues of sameness and difference in the context of the globalization of gay male identity, particularly in terms of the growing identification of upper class Filipinos with "global gayness." The figure of the global gay is investigated as a hegemonic, yet unstable, point of self-identification that enables the production of anxious subjects that are simultaneously privileged and marginalized, local and global, indigenous and cosmopolitan. I attempt to explore these contradictions by rereading the globalization of gay identity as a product of Althusserian interpellation processes, understood in terms of self-identification (subscription rather than ascription) animated by narrative pleasure and by reexamining mimicry as a never-to-be-completed task that involves the reproduction of a regime of Whiteness. I also examine how journeys to "gay" metropoles serve to rupture dreams of belonging and conclude with a preliminary exploration of how globalization carries the potential for an ethics of sexual difference grounded on indeterminacy and in-betweenness.