About

Emmanuel David is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, sexuality, and globalization. His recent research on gender and sexuality in the Philippines has focused on a wide range of topics, including global call centers, the politics of beauty pageants, sex work and militarism, and contemporary art and performance. He is currently working on a book project about Christine Jorgensen’s performance tour across Asia and the Pacific in the early 1960s. Additionally, he is engaged in an artist-scholar collaboration with Yumi Janairo Roth focused on the untold history of the Filipino Rough Riders of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Their work, We Are Coming, will be featured in the MCA Denver’s Cowboy exhibition, which is traveling to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. His previous work focused on the gendered dimensions of disaster, and he is the author of Women of the Storm: Civic Activism after Hurricane Katrina and co-editor of The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster. His scholarship has been published in various academic journals including ASAP/Journal, Feminist Formations, Gender & Society, GLQ, Radical History Review, Sexualities, TSQ, Verge, and WSQ. At CU Boulder, he teaches courses such as Introduction to LGBT Studies, Women of Color & Activism, Gender, Race, and Class in a Global Context, Queer Theory, and Critical Inquiries in Transgender Studies. He has received CU Boulder's Best Should Teach Award for excellence in teaching.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Gender studies
• Genealogy
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Mathematics
• Anthropology
• Advertising
• Archaeology
• Linguistics
• Business
• Law
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Biology
• Art
• Literature

Selected publications

• Implementation of Human Resource Management to improve the performance of youth organizations in Port Moresby

  Journal of Asian Multicultural Research for Economy and Management Study · 2024-11-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This research work focuses on HRM practices in youth organizations in Port Moresby- Papua New Guinea and the resultant effect on organizational performance. Carrying out qualitative case study research with five youth organizations the study examines the recruitment; training; performance management and staff motivation strategies adopted by the youth organizations’ human resource management systems. Qualitative data were obtained by conducting 20 interviews with key informants: organizational leadership, human resource management, and programmed staffs; consulting documents. The study outcomes show that despite the presence of the practices, HRM has issues of limited resources, adopted systems, and high turnover rates that affect the implementation of the strategies. The study further establishes that absence of formal HR systems, and difficulties in maintaining motivated workforce, affect the organizational performance. In relation to the HRM literature, these findings add to the limited research that has been done on practicing HRM in non-profit youth organizations with specific focus on the developing nations. Aid from the study is that HRM should be a context that requires the identification of suitable strategies that may offset the scarcity of resources and lead to enhanced organizational performance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Playing Filipino: Racial Display, Resistance, and the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Advertising
  • Genealogy

  Abstract: This article examines the intersection of empire, national identity, performance, and cultural representation through an analysis of the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West . Drawing on historical material—including newspaper articles and illustrations, photographs, and Wild West ephemera—this article explores how and why Filipino performers were included in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and how they were represented by the exposition, the press, and the performers themselves. It develops the concept of “playing Filipino,” a phrase that adapts and alters the notion of “playing Indian,” to capture the interactive process of performing not only racialized types for white-dominated audiences and institutions, but also the resistant and creative activity of embodying Filipino-ness through self-crafted style and aesthetic appearance. This study advances transnational Asian American studies by presenting new ways of thinking about turn of the twentieth-century Filipino performers and their relation to US imperialism through cultural institutions and popular entertainment like traveling Wild West shows, and it also expands American West scholarship by considering how Asian subjects figured into constructions of US domestic and overseas frontiers during times of war.

  PublisherDOI

• Transpinay: Genealogy of a term

  Sexualities · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Genealogy
  • Sociology

  This article provides a genealogical analysis of the Philippine category “transpinay,” a compound word combining “trans” and “pinay.” It traces the coining of the term by trans activists in the first decade of the 21st century and examines the ways in which the term gained its currency by drawing out distinctions between gender and sexuality categories. The article investigates what the category includes and what the category excludes, and examines disputes over the term’s categorical boundaries. Overall, the article aims not to determine what the term transpinay is, but rather investigates what the term does and how it came to be.

  PublisherDOI

• Fantasies of Elsewhere

  TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  The time has come for transgender studies to think more critically about spatiality. In Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, Aren Z. Aizura argues that the dominant cultural narratives of gender transition in mainstream popular discourse and scholarly theories tend to conform to chrononormativity and linear time. There's often an uncritical trafficking in temporal tropes such as “pre and post” and “before and after.” However, as Aizura shows in this brilliant book, a focus on “temporality risks losing site of the spatial and geographical” (2). This conceptual turn toward spatial considerations of transgender experience sets up one of the book's main arguments: that “tropes of transnational geographic travel are central to the cultural and political intelligibility of gender reassignment” (3).Through a close analysis of cultural materials, including historical documents, literary texts, films, photographs, online media, and workplace policies and handbooks, coupled with extensive ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in Thailand and Australia, Aizura makes the compelling case that “transsexuality, the normative Euro-American category of trans subjectivity, becomes intelligible as a modern concept through its staging as a journey through ‘elsewhere’ spaces” (3). By investigating the spatial metaphors of geographic journey, Aizura maps out the unevenness of mobility and the ways in which travel is opened up for some people and foreclosed for others. This key tension appears in the normative imaginaries of gender reassignment as being routed through an “elsewhere” space on a journey that is “always already imbricated within and facilitated by formations of political economy and post- and neocolonialisms” (4).Mobile Subjects includes an introduction and five chapters organized into two parts. Part 1 focuses on various grammars and discourses of mobility, particularly in historical representations of transsexuality, in autobiographical texts, and in cinematic narratives. Part 2 examines the material practices of travel and mobility grounded in empirical data from the author's ethnographic fieldwork. An epilogue rounds out the book, serving as both a conclusion and a preview of future work.“Introduction: Provincializing Trans” provides an overview of how trans individuals and communities have negotiated uneven access to health care and medical treatments, especially in contexts shaped by market forces and varying degrees of state support. Together, these create conditions for trans people to seek out transnational travel and migration as individual solutions to public problems. The introduction also offers a theoretical and methodological itinerary for the chapters that follow. It is here that readers are offered new theoretical tools to challenge conventional understandings of the “West as the center of everything and the originator of new identities, cultures, and ideas” (8). Aizura also offers the key concept of “provincializing trans.” Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty's work Provincializing Europe, Aizura uses provincializing in the context of trans studies “to point to the origin stories of transgender mobility and to question the narrative equating gender transition with geographical mobility” (8). Aizura continues, “Such a narrative draws from modern European liberalism to frame the transsexual subject as autonomous, self-inventing, and enabled by the division of the world into a domestic or national here and an unfamiliar or unimportant there” (9).Chapter 1, “The Persistence of Trans Travel Narratives,” examines how discourses of travel and mobility figure into historical narratives, including those that circulated widely during the emergence and consolidation of transgender as an umbrella term in the early 1990s. During this time, Aizura argues, there was a proliferation of texts, many of which were addressed to trans readers, that reconstructed the past and recuperated historical figures to leverage claims that trans people have existed in all times and places. One person that figured prominently in these histories was Christine Jorgensen, who in 1953 returned to the United States after having undergone gender-reassignment surgery. Drawing on Susan Stryker's historical work, Aizura maps out the ways in which Jorgensen's journey abroad and return home came to represent the “ground zero” of transgender history (31). Here, “ground zero refers not only to Jorgensen's appearance on the world stage, or her celebrity, but the event of her public return to the United States from Denmark” (31). The focus on Jorgensen's departure and return, as emblematic of trans travel narratives, combined with the chapter's deconstruction of contemporary ideas of transition vacations, bolsters Aizura's overall argument about the importance of spatial logics in conceptualizing understandings of gender transition. Aizura provincializes this hegemonic and racialized story of departure and return, pointing out how the physical mobility of certain “ideal” and respectable trans subjects dovetails with deeply embedded US ideologies of liberal individualism premised on success, self-transformation, self-invention, and social mobility. As Aizura writes, “To place this story at the center of transgender history privileges whiteness and the imperative of social mobility, as well as an imperialist division of the world into a national here and a colonial elsewhere” (32). Pointing out work in trans and queer of color critique, the chapter concludes by interrogating liberal models of legibility and recognition and asks readers to consider which subjects are deemed worthy of consideration.Chapter 2, “On Location: Transsexual Autobiographies, Whiteness, and Travel,” shifts attention from narratives of trans history to a close reading of trans autobiographies that also feature the tropes of travel, mobility, and immigration. As Aizura writes, “Autobiographies are central to understanding the geographical mapping of transsexuality, not only as a category of medicine but also as a category of personal and political self-definition” (60). The chapter examines three transsexual memoirs: Jan Morris's 1967 memoir Conundrum, Deirdre McCloskey's 1999 memoir Crossing, and Jennifer Finley Boylan's 2004 memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. Aizura treats these autobiographical accounts of gender crossing and travel as part of the genre of travel writing by “taking into consideration the historical and generic traditions of much travel writing as a colonial, imperialist venture” (61). Drawing on transnational feminism and critical race theory, Aizura examines the ways in which these texts engage practices of Orientalism and liberal multiculturalism. In this first part of the chapter, for example, Aizura reads Morris's journey from London to Casablanca, dubbed in the 1960s and 1970s as the “sex change capital of the world,” as parallel to her journey from male to female. In a close reading of the memoir, Aizura observes how Conundrum offers “a richly detailed and unabashedly orientalist perspective on Casablanca” (72), one that depicts the city as an “exotic and premodern location.”The second part of chapter 2 examines McCloskey's Crossing and Boylan's She's Not There, which both appeared in the context of US liberal multiculturalism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Both autobiographical accounts present gender transition through the metaphor of immigration. The analogy to immigration, Aizura argues, has the effect of treating transsexuals as “implicitly white” and “as a minority population modeled on and analogous to racial minorities” (81). As such, Aizura contends, the narratives of both books “obscure the exclusionary racial logics of the US nation-state and the injustice of US immigration regulation” and by extension, “present a conservative imaginary of gender and transsexuality” (81). The chapter concludes with a powerful argument against trans analogy, suggesting that analogies between transness and immigrant as racial other “consign immigrant struggles to a historical past, erasing the ongoing struggle for justice, rights, and more open borders by immigrants in the United States” (91). Finally, the chapter's conclusion suggests that the autobiographic genre is shifting away from the white middle-class transsexual memoir and toward a new era of trans of color cultural production by women like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. Yet, Aizura writes, “the recent focus on trans women of color in trans cultural representations evidences a historical shift toward neoliberal multiculturalism, in which trans people of color are championed as representatives of institutional diversity and required to perform more labor as such” (90). The chapter conclusion ruminates on the neoliberal imaginary of trans rights, thus situating this project in relation to a critical trans politics that examines the limits of trans rights frameworks (Namaste 2011; Spade 2012).Chapter 3, “Documentary and the Metronormative Trans Migration Plot,” examines cinematic representations of transgender life through a close, interpretive reading of three documentary films. Aizura argues that these films rely on formulaic plotlines that portray subjects engaged in transnational and rural-to-urban migration. Drawing on theories of metronormativity in queer studies by scholars such as Jack Halberstam and Scott Herring, Aizura reworks this foundational concept and presents readers with the notion of the metronormative trans migration plot. According to Aizura, “The metronormative migration plot dictates that migrating from rural to urban spaces or migrating transnationally can offer the possibility of self-fulfillment and the ‘freedom to be who you are’: by moving, trans people can find bearable and worthwhile lives in which gender identity and sexuality are accepted and celebrated” (96). Like the so-called great gay migrations of the 1970s (Weston 1995), the metronormative trans migration plot relies on the discursive production of spatial imaginaries through which trans subjects move through en route to self-actualization. As such, gender transition hinges on a crossing of a mythically produced spatial line between the global North and the global South and between urban and rural. Aizura argues that the discursive production of space in this way relies on two exceptionalist assumptions: “that the Global North is more livable than the Global South, and the metronormative assumption that urban areas are more livable than rural areas” (96).The rest of the chapter focuses on how these mythic constructions manifest differently in three documentary films: Johnny Bergmann's Gender Redesigner (2007); Tomer Heymann's Bubot niyar (Paper Dolls, 2006); and Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva's Les travestis pleurent aussi (Travestis Also Cry, 2007). The spatial logics of the metronormative plot vary, Aizura argues, according to social factors such as gender, race, and labor. For example, Aizura suggests that Gender Redesigner demonstrates a relatively straightforward and formulaic narrative of fAe, a white trans masculine subject, as engaged in rural-to-urban queer and trans migration. Aizura argues that it is no coincidence that fAe's transition story is individualized, because it shores up the “classic American individualist fantasy of liberal reinvention and materializing dreams of a better life” (111).By contrast, Bubot niyar and Les travestis pleurent aussi, which focus on communities of color, situate trans issues as more explicitly linked to transnational migration, socioeconomic class, labor, and precarity. Bubot niyar, for example, focuses on a group of Filipina migrant workers who, by day, care for elderly Orthodox Jewish men in Israel; by night, the same workers form a drag troupe and perform in the gay clubs of Tel Aviv. Aizura's close reading of the film interrogates the simple conventions of the trans migration plot by showing that it is unevenly shaped by labor and immigrant status. A similar critique is to be found in Les travestis pleurent aussi, which focuses on Ecuadorian sex workers in Paris. Aizura contends that the spatial logics of the film focus less on issues of individual identity and instead center a politics of “sex work, global economic injustice, and border controls” (125). And while dominant metronormativity plots focus on mobility as an itinerary toward a fantasy of freedom, the film ruminates on issues of “stuckness and immobility” (128) of certain queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming subjects (an issue Aizura returns to in the epilogue). This focus on the trans migration plot sets the stage for future research in the field that would examine issues of trans rurality and suburban experience, as well as return migration of transnational migrants, such as Filipino balikbayans.Whereas the first part of the book focuses on historical, literary, and cinematic representation, the second part, comprising chapters 4 and 5, examine what Aizura describes as the material spatial practices of mobility and immobility. Chapter 4, “Gender Reassignment and Transnational Entrepreneurialisms of the Self,” draws on autoethnographic and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the material obstacles to trans health care and the tensions that emerge between gatekeeper models and consumer models. Aizura examines the ways in which trans subjects navigate the uneven contours of trans health care and the differences between Australia's welfare state provision of gender-reassignment surgeries and Thailand's expanding medical tourism industry, which provides a niche market for consumers seeking gender-reassignment surgeries. This individualized consumption, Aizura points out, occurs in the context of neoliberal privatization of medicine and of the free-market consumer models of health care. Coining the phrase “entrepreneurialism of the self,” Aizura examines the micropolitics of consumer subjectivation in Thai clinics as it takes shape in medical authority and clinical procedures. Reminiscent of political economy work on how we are becoming “CEOs of ‘ME, Inc.’” (Irving 2012: 157), Aizura maps out the way in which trans subjects use “mobility as cultural capital” in ways that inform their consumer choices about their “DIY selves” (144). In doing so, Aizura draws attention to the “political economy of access to trans and gender nonconforming people's bodily modification” (144) as a location where biomedicalization becomes stratified. A major contribution of this chapter is Aizura's call for a methodological complexity in transgender studies that examines differences in trans health care across spatial scales and geographical levels of analysis, including in “spaces in which transgender doesn't even apply as a coherent category” (172).In chapter 5, “The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: Race, Labor, and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics,” Aizura presents empirical data on non-Thai transgender subjects and their medical travel to Thailand for gender-reassignment procedures. This chapter first examines how this niche travel market emerged over the past few decades. Aizura lays out a host of market relations that shape the gender-reassignment surgery industry's rebranding of itself as providing luxury services and comprehensive care and after-care packages that cater to the needs of non-Thai medical travelers seeking the “‘Rolls-Royce treatment’ in the most luxurious clinics” (180). The rest of the chapter examines Thai tourist-marketing strategies and their self-Orientalizing representations on clinic websites and promotional materials, as well as narratives of non-Thai trans women who imagine Thailand through Orientalist frameworks. One interviewee, for example, described her trip to Thailand as a “magical experience.” Another interviewee tells a story about getting a tattoo on her shoulder of a mermaid goddess, inspired by a painting she saw while traveling in Thailand. These vignettes suggest the centrality of the geographical journey as metaphor for gender transformation. As Aizura writes, “The women involved in my project seemed to associate the imagined cultural and spatial milieu of Thailand with femininity (implicitly encoding the West as the masculine part of a heteronormative East/West dyad). Thus, Thailand is understood to have a particular transformative power that is specific to trans embodiment” (192). The last part of the chapter examines the affective labor of the clinic and the ways in which Thai staff interact with non-Thai patients. This part of the chapter will be particularly useful for scholars of affective and emotional labor and the neoliberal extraction of surplus value. The chapter conclusion reflects on how transnational solidarities are needed to confront the tension between state provision and the privatization of care.Overall, Mobile Subjects is an important contribution to the field of trans studies and to interdisciplinary investigations of trans experiences. This pioneering book successfully offers a decentering critique that charts interconnections and enmeshments across histories and geopolitical formations. Mobile Subjects provides new conceptual tools for trans studies that should be able to travel and be taken up in different geographical and historical contexts by scholars in the field. In particular, Aizura's concept of provincializing trans will prove particularly useful for scholars and activists seeking to challenge trans exceptionalism and the “framing of transgender (and transgender studies) as the new civil rights issue emerging in an allegedly postracial America” (58). Provincializing trans, as Aizura so persuasively argues throughout the book, means grappling with transgender racialization and the ways in which geographic frames of here, there, and elsewhere have figured prominently in historical texts and cultural productions that have come to be grouped together in the emergent field of transgender studies. Methodologically, Aizura skillfully weaves together historical and cultural texts with ethnographic materials, and his autoethnographic accounts, especially in the book's introduction, narrate the project's origins in the author's and others' struggles to access trans health care and the often painful individual negotiations with health-care providers.Mobile Subject's epilogue, titled “Visions of Trans Worlding,” situates the book's key themes in the context of the contemporary moment, which has been described as a transgender tipping point. Using the Netflix show Sense8 as a case study, Aizura argues that contemporary cultural production can continue to replicate fantasies of mobility that are racialized and colonial. The book ends with a call for a decolonial framework that resists the white colonial narratives examined throughout the study. The creative work of two gender-nonconforming artists, Arun Ravine and Tannia Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, is presented to illustrate what such decolonial aesthetic projects would look like. The artists that Aizura studies here restage Orientalist images and engage in performances of immobility to draw attention to the ways in which mobility and the fantasy of finding oneself elsewhere often rely on imperialist racial and the of the By with an of immobility than mobility, Aizura to the political of being As has also a of certain in the of formulaic transnational mobility stories that rely on an Aizura offers a powerful challenge to consider the of and the of in

  PublisherDOI

• Big, Bakla, and Beautiful: Transformations on a Manila Pageant Stage

  Women's studies quarterly · 2018-01-01 · 29 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the cultural politics of beauty among fat bakla subjects in the urban Philippines. Drawing on firsthand observations, we provide a descriptive account of a beauty pageant for plus-size queer and gender nonconforming contestants. We argue that these subjects, by putting their bodies and subordinate statuses on display, have constructed a fat bakla counterpublic. In the first section, we provide an ethnographic description of the pageant setting. In the following sections, we examine the themes that emerged from candidate performances, particularly those that reveal the intertwined nature of gender, class, sexuality, race, and fat bodies. Finally, we examine how participants used the pageant as a platform for advocacy, constructing a counterpublic for a wide range of identities and embodiments.

  PublisherDOI

• Deaf Turns, Beki Turns, Transformations: Toward New Forms of Deaf Queer Sociality

  Feminist formations · 2018-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores deaf queer cultures and advocacy in the Philippines. Through an analysis of a deaf gay beauty pageant and a series of HIV and AIDS awareness video blogs (vlogs) for and about deaf LGBT Filipinos, this article examines the queer/crip nexus as it intersects with discourses of contagion and normalization. We employ Michele Friedner's concept of "deaf turns" as an analytic to understand these two cases, which we see as vivid examples of deaf orientations and similitude. We focus on embodied deaf turns that occur on a beauty pageant stage and argue that actors carve out deaf-centered spaces in which they emphasize deaf queer worth and value. Then, we examine how deaf subjects, in collaboration with a hearing LGBT organization, plead for hearing-centered institutions to engage in a turn—a deaf turn or quarter turn—to make these spaces more accessible. Finally, we argue that the vlog, through its deployment of beki sign language, in contradistinction to Filipino Sign Language, not only pushes parts of hearing society to make deaf turns and quarter turns, but also exhibits what we describe as a beki turn, a reorientation toward beki culture. Taken together, we argue that as deaf turns and beki turns come in contact, they produce new forms of deaf queer sociality.

  PublisherDOI

• The Art of Trans Politics

  Contexts · 2018-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Emmanuel David on contemporary artist Cassils’s embodied struggle and trans politics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transgender Archipelagos

  TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly · 2018-08-01 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article explores the promise of an archipelagic analytic for transgender studies through an interpretive investigation of a beauty pageant in the Philippines. Drawing on transgender studies scholarship and the emergent field of archipelagic studies, this article traces how the pageant underwent a series of archipelagic turns when the slate of candidates shifted from representing nations to representing islands, provinces, and regions across the Philippine archipelago. This turn, the author argues, displaced the centrality of the nation and put forward a translocal and translingual focus that centered islandness and island-island relations as the primary categories of embodiment and performance. In the conclusion, this article argues more broadly that transgender studies, with its discontiguous and decentered character, can also be characterized in archipelagic terms. Taken together, this article adds a new heuristic to transgender studies scholarship, while also including transgender in the growing corpus of work in archipelagic American studies that challenges “continental exceptionalism.”

  PublisherDOI

• The Flight

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter narrates Women of the Storm’s early morning charter flight from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., on January 30, 2006. It begins with an account of the women’s arrival at Louis Armstrong International Airport and concludes with the group’s arrival in Washington. Throughout the chapter, several participants—Pam Bryan, Barbara Blackwell, Cecile Tebo, and Virginia Saussy––are profiled to explore their varying experiences during and immediately after Katrina.

  PublisherDOI

• Noblesse Oblige

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the follow-up work that occurred immediately after Women of the Storm’s trip to Washington on January 30, 2006, including writing thank-you notes and sending follow-up e-mails. In addition to focusing on these activities, the chapter examines participant reflections on the trip and the membership dynamics. Some participants also offer critiques of media portrayals of the group, especially coverage that focused on socioeconomic class. Others reflect on their work as an extension of elite women’s contributions to society in non-crisis times, activities captured in the concepts of noblesse oblige and civic stewardship.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• C. Sorbet

  Météo-France

  2 shared

• Thomas Godfroy

  2 shared

• Caroline Girard

  2 shared

• Marc Erlich

  Artelia (France)

  2 shared

• Vivien Pourret

  Université de Toulouse

  2 shared

• Christian Joy Pattawi Cruz

  University of the Philippines System

  2 shared

• Martine Veysseire

  Météo-France

  2 shared

• Elaine Enarson

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• CU Boulder's Best Should Teach Award