12 June 12.15-13.45 (British Summer Time or GMT)
Jennifer B. Delfino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) presents “What’s (Not) In a Letter? The Erasure of Filipinx Subjectivity in Filipino Discourses of Coloniality.” Catherine Tebaldi (University of Luxembourg) will serve as discussant. The paper to be discussed will be shared before the workshop. To receive a copy of the paper and the Zoom link to the meeting, please join our listserv or email our workshop coordinator for Spring 2025: Anna Weichselbraun.
Abstract: 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 of erasure in postcolonial subject-making, this article examines the 2021-2022 “Filipinx controversy” on social media, which emerged as a debate about the authenticity of ethnonyms Filipino versus Filipinx following the 2021 addition of Filipinx to Dictionary.com. Combining theories and methods in postcolonial semiotics and trans linguistics, the article examines how idealized Filipino identity models rearticulate and transform 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. While drawing on key approaches and concepts in linguistic anthropology, the article argues that without attention to erasure and the “radical alterity” (Derrida 1982) offered by queer and trans of color perspectives, linguistic anthropology risks replicating the “totalizing vision(s)” (Gal and Irvine 2019) of the colonial structures and processes it purports to describe.